Just wanted to share a little piece I did for Valentine’s Day this year. Enjoy your day, and even more importantly, enjoy all that discounted chocolate and candy tomorrow! 😉
Tag: holiday
Happy National Moth Week!
I love random weird holidays, and obviously I love moths, so you can imagine my excitement when I just discovered that the last week of July is National Moth Week! 😀
In celebration I thought I’d share some of my old moth-inspired drawings as well as some fun facts about my blog’s whimsical little namesake.
Fun Fact #1: Although the moths I drew in the image above are fluttering around in the dark, not ALL moths are nocturnal. Some are out and about in the daytime and some of them are even important pollinators. Some of our daytime pollinating moths are even confused regularly for other pollinators such as bees or even hummingbirds.
FUN FACT #2: The world’s smallest moth, the Stigmella Maya, comes from Mexico with a forewing measuring in at a mere 1.2 millimeters. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the well-named Hercules Moth, with the largest ever documented boasting a whopping wingspan of 36 centimeters!
FUN FACT #3: I was very surprised to learn this just recently, but those feathery fluffy antennae that many of us associate with moths, is actually a trait specific to male moths.
FUN FACT #4: There are some moths, like the Luna Moth, who do not even have a mouth and survive only long enough to breed. An adult Luna Moth will only live a few short days.
Well, that’s it for my little National Moth Week appreciation post! What do you think of moths? What’s your favorite kind?
4 Years Ignited
Woo! If you see a bunch of fireworks lighting up the night sky tomorrow night, no need to be surprised. They’re clearly in celebration of my blog’s fourth birthday! 😉
With social distancing the new norm these days, what better celebration than an online celebration? And who better to party with than all the amazing blogging buddies I’ve made these past four years?? ❤
So, how are we celebrating? I thought I’d try something interesting and get some creative input from you guys. 🙂 After all, there’s no way I would have stuck around this long blogging if it weren’t for all you amazing people that make up the WP community. ❤ Since the 4th of July officially marks my 4 year blogiversary, I figured I’d have each of you who want to participate give me 4 bits of inspiration for drawing, and that I could post the illustrations I come up with based off your individual input. So, here are my 4 questions posed to whoever is game to play. (No pressure!) All you have to do is leave me a comment with your answers to the following 4 questions and I’ll (eventually in the near-ish future) draw pieces that you helped inspire. So, let’s get onto it, shall we?
My Questions For YOU:
1.) What is your favorite mythical creature?
2.) If you lived in a fantasy or science fiction story, what sort of occupation would you want to have?
3.) What is your favorite character from a well-known fairy tale, fable, or legend?
4.) What real-life animal do you find to be the strangest-looking?
I hope you liked the questions I posed for you guys and that you will join in on the fun and leave your input. When I draw something based off your answer(s) I’ll post it here on my blog and leave a link to your blog in thanks for the inspiration you gave. Like I said, I just thought it would be fun to try a little something different.
Thanks again to each and every one of you who has kept me coming back time and time again over the past 4 years. I hope you all have a great weekend, and Happy 4th of July to those of you who celebrate it! ❤
Holiday Book Haul (PLUS Exploding Kittens!)
No worries, my fuzzy little monster Bailey is not one of the titular “Exploding Kittens”, I just really wanted to show off her Christmas photo because I’m a crazy cat mom. 😛 We’ll get to the actual Exploding Kittens later on in this post, but for now let’s get into the excitement that is this year’s HOLIDAY BOOK HAUL!
The Hunger – A horror historical fiction book about the Donner Party that I’ve been very excited for. I’ve already started reading it!
Fire & Blood – The first volume of George RR Martin’s two-part history of the Targaryens.
Remarkable Books: The World’s Most Beautiful and Historic Works – Nonfiction about books and history, which just so happen to be two of my favorite things. 🙂 Already reading this one, too.
History of the World Map by Map – I already mentioned that I enjoy history, well, I also just so happen to enjoy maps. 🙂
Great Maps – a look at cartography throughout the ages!
Biology: An Illustrated History of Life Science – Woohoo! Science! 😀
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Vol. 1: The Crucible – After watching (and loving) the new Netflix series, along with their holiday special, I’m quite pumped to read this!
Redlands, Vol. 1 – although I’m not very familiar with this comic, I know it has to do with “murder, magic and mayhem” so consider me intrigued. 😉
Witch Hammer – Ya know, I’m really beginning to notice a theme here . . . 😛
Locke & Key: Heaven and Earth – So excited to return to the horrific and magical world of Locke & Key!
Pandora’s Legacy – this one is a total wildcard for me, so I’m curious to check it out. It’s always interesting reading modern takes on mythology. 🙂
Unnatural, Vol. 1 – this series was nowhere on my radar but it was one that was recently highly recommended, so I’m interested to see what it’s all about.
Alisik – This one looks like spooky fun, and I was surprised to discover that the interior artwork is actually much more detailed than the cover, something that more often turns out to be the opposite.
Gotham City Sirens: Book One – Catwoman, Poison Ivy, and Harley Quinn shenanigans galore in this collection of issues 1-13.
Gotham City Sirens: Book Two – Now that you can only get this series in these 2 books rather than the singular volumes like I had started collecting a while back, it’s good to finally have the full collection! For some reason I had stopped reading it with just the final volume to go and never got the chance to finish it. Looking forward to seeing how the series wraps up. 🙂
Soooo, that sums up my Holiday Book/Comic Haul. I’m so thankful for all the amazing reading material I’ve been gifted and I can’t wait to read it all! That said, let us finally talk about those Exploding Kittens, shall we??
As the box says, Exploding Kittens is a card game for people who are into kittens and explosions. I was fortunate enough to get the NSFW version along with the expansion Imploding Kittens, complete with a “cone of shame” to make sure you feel appropriately terrible about yourself for losing. 😛 The game was a ton of fun and so easy to pick up on. Think Russian Roulette . . . but with exploding kittens!
I hope you guys have been enjoying your holiday season and have had a little time to unwind before the new year starts! ❤ Have you read or are interested in reading any of these titles? Get any awesome new books yourself?
Happy Halloween, My Dears!
What a wickedly wonderful October it has been! Now that we’ve finally arrived at this most excellent of holidays, I just want to wish each and every one of you a Happy Halloween! ❤ November is nearly upon us, which means my month long blogging hiatus I mentioned previously is about to commence. It’s all in the spirit of NaNoWriMo and I will miss each and every one of you in November, but I shall return come December. (Hopefully with news of a successful NaNoWriMo.) 😉
To those of you also participating in the challenge, I wish you the best of luck and look forward to seeing how you do when the month comes to an end.
Now, let’s get back to the Halloween talk, shall we?? 😀 This Halloween was basically a month-long affair for me. Between doing Halloween-related activities all throughout the month at work and nomming on ALL the pumpkin goodies, I also squeezed in some ghastly good times binging on horror movies/shows and partaking in frightening festivities. The highlight of which has been, without a doubt, the big halloween bash that is Detroit’s very own Theatre Bizarre! Mr. Moth and I attended the event, hosted in the Detroit Masonic Temple (the largest Masonic temple in the world) where they transformed eight floors into a wonderland of curiosities and Halloween delight.
With burlesque performances, live bands, fire dancers, contortionists, body suspension, a ghost train, and so much more, we wound up being up well into the early hours of the morning hustling around to see as many of the sights as we could.
One of the rules for entry into the event is that costumes are absolutely mandatory. We decided to go in matching black and white attire and dress up as skeletons for the night. Originally, the plan was to get our makeup professionally done, but the makeup place was booked the day of the event so I sucked it up and bought the needed cosmetics and ended up doing our makeup myself. I’ve never tried doing face paint before, but I’m pretty happy with how our makeup turned out. We got a lot of compliments throughout the night from people. 🙂
It was utterly amazing seeing the way they transformed the historic building into a sort of hellish vaudevillian escape. It was something I’d been wanting to experience for myself for some time, so I’m beyond happy that we went.
I hope each of you has been having an equally fun October and has a wonderful Halloween! Looking forward to catching up with everyone come December when NaNoWriMo and my month-long blogging hiatus come to an end. ❤ Take care, everyone!! ❤ ❤ ❤
Oh, and here is my final Inktober drawing. Wish I’d had time to do more of them throughout the month, but it is what it is! 😛
Whirlwind of a Month: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of August
Well, well, well . . . look who finally stumbled her way back onto WordPress. This old gal! It may have seemed like I dropped off the face of the earth, but it was only due to the frenzy of chaos I like to refer to as August 2018. Sooo, yeah, totally ready for this month to be DONE.
Monday is Labor Day here, so that means a nice three day weekend. While some of the people I work with are going on trips for the holiday weekend, the only trip I shall be taking is straight to the Oral Surgeon this Saturday morning. Yaaaaay. Wisdom teeth, amirite?
Anywhoo, that sums up “the ugly”, leaving “the bad” as all the other stressful stuff that just never seemed to come to an end this month, so enough of all that, let’s get to the FUN stuff, THE GOOD:
August’s Book Haul:
After watching and enjoying the movie Odd Thomas, I’d been pretty interested in reading the book series that it came from. I was pretty pumped to discover two of the books in the series at a recent used book sale and so I promptly snatched those babies up. I’ve never actually read any Dean Koontz books, so I’m curious to see what I think.
Another author I’ve never ventured into reading yet is Laurell K. Hamilton. Not sure if it’s a wise or risky move diving into a collection of her short stories rather than an actual novel, but we shall see what happens! 😀
I’ve not really even dipped so much as a toe into the pool of mystery literature out there, but the Detective Lavender Mysteries series caught my attention when it popped up for sale on the kindle recently. Gonna give it a shot.
More volumes of Giant Days is always a plus, so getting volume 6 as a surprise definitely lifted my spirits on a particularly rough day this month. 🙂 Don’t be fooled by the whole “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend” load of silliness. Sometimes, comics will prove to do just fine. 😉 It’s all about the thoughtful gesture, not the extravagance of it.
The Resurrectionist caught by attention just from that snazzy cover quite some time ago. Caught it on a good deal via the Kindle and am looking forward to giving it a go!
And although I haven’t gotten to see the film version of The Meg like I’d have liked to by now, I did obtain the book, so yay for that! Will it be outlandish and probably ridiculous? Of course. Will I probably love it even more so because of that?? Most definitely.
I got some other books this month thanks to that used book sale I mentioned, but these are the six I’m most intrigued about.
Anywayyy, just wanted to pop in and say that I’m still kicking, just been busier and more stressed than normal lately. September is shaping up to be a busy month as well, but I hope to be able to squeeze in more blog time than I was able to in August. 🙂 You guys are awesome and I’ve missed getting to see what adventures you’ve all been up to. I’m going to try to catch up some this weekend, but it may take a while. Especially since I don’t know what to expect after oral surgery (except a swollen face and a healthy dose of hurting). If you’ve had any recent exciting news or anything and wanna chat about it please comment it up so I can read all about it. Feel free to even link me some of your spiffy posts I may have missed. 🙂 It’s always great catching up with you guys! ❤ Have a happy weekend, everyone! ❤ ❤ ❤
May The 4th Be With You!
Happy Star Wars Day, everyone!! ❤
After several super-busy weeks, I’m finally all moved and ready for things to start settling back into something vaguely resembling normalcy. I’ve missed all you fine and fancy folks and your snazzy blogs, so I’m looking forward to playing catch-up this weekend with plenty or reading and commenting. 🙂
Hoping to start posting much more frequently again now that I’m getting more settled into the new job and new place. And what better day to hop back into things than Star Wars Day?? 😀 That said, let the memes commence!!
Getting Festive
Happy Holidayyyys! ❤ Today is Christmas Eve and with all the recent and upcoming festivities I wanted to squeeze some time in to pop in and say Merry Christmas since I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to tomorrow. 🙂
Last night we met up with my boyfriend’s family’s for their annual bake-a-thon, where we baked and decorated an arsenal of Christmas cookies. Shapes ranged from reindeer to unicorns and everything in between. Seriously, I mean everything in between. We also had an armadillo-shaped cookie and a penis-shaped cookie because inappropriate baked goods are funny. His mom also made these delicious pastries called Rugelach.
We’re celebrating tonight’s Christmas Eve at my boyfriend’s parents’ house, and Christmas over with my family so I’m pretty excited. I feel like I did a lot of holiday stuff this year. More than I think I usually do, so while all the running around can be stressful and tiring at times, it did make for a particularly festive holiday season so far. 🙂
Some of the holiday highlights included:
Visiting a historical village’s Holiday Nights event. It was really cool walking around after dark, learning some interesting stuff and seeing the rambunctious “murmurers” in action. I didn’t know anything about this old “murmuring” holiday tradition, but apparently it involves revelers of the season dressing up in disguises to go house-to-house for food and drink and partying it up. So, it’s kind of like Halloween at Christmas for adults, except you get booze instead of candy. Not too shabby, in my opinion. Why the heck did we do away with this awesome tradition?
Goings to an outdoor Kringle Market and shopping around for lots of goodies, including my new favorite dessert, The Christmas Kronut. This was my second year going, and although the crowd can be a bit much, I plan on going again next year. It was a lot of fun. 🙂
Christmas shopping for my loved ones is always a fun thing to do. I love when you find someone the perfect gift and then seeing the look on their face when they open it. I will say, though: I normally quite dislike wrapping the presents. It’s just tedious. lol My attention span has never been in it. I moaned and groaned the whole way through it, but I think I actually did a decent job wrapping gifts this year. I’m not known for my wrapping skills, in fact, I’m known for purposely wrapping the gifts in a manner that makes it look like a toddler did it. Or a drunk uncle. One or the other.
The work holiday party was also a lot of fun. I’ve mentioned before that I work as a program instructor at a day program for adults with special needs. I love my job every day, but seeing all their faces light up when they got to meet Santa Clause and taking our room caroling around the entire building was just so nice. We sang fun, upbeat songs like Jingle Bell Rock, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, etc. and had a bunch of fun instruments for everyone to play. We did a big potluck and since I baked a bunch of stuff for the last couple work parties I decided to take it easy on myself for this one and brought in rolls and made a some delicious Garlic Parmesan Butter to go with them.
Minus some stressful family medical issues that have luckily since been improving, the last month of 2017 has been a pretty good one. 🙂 I’m excited to see what the new year will bring. I hope you guys all enjoy what’s left of the holiday season and have plenty of festivities of your own! ❤
Happy Halloween!
Let the festivities officially begin because Halloween is upon us! (Although I’ve been trying to squeeze in Halloween hijinks throughout the whole month.) 😛
It’s pretty dang cold here in Michigan right now, but that’s okay. I’m soaking up all this fall weather while I can. This past weekend I got to head out of town to spend it with my #1 partner in crime, Cupcakes and Machetes. She was hosting our book club’s October meeting and threw a lovely get-together with delicious fall goodies and an awesome tour of the old cemetery behind her house. I stayed the night and we wound up carving pumpkins and watching the first 2 episodes of the latest season of Stranger Things. (I can’t wait to see the rest of it!) It was a great way to spend the weekend before Halloween, not to mention how gorgeous all the trees were on the drive! 🙂
I can’t wait to see all the costumes everyone wears at work today. I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but I’m a program instructor at a day program for adults with special needs and we’re having a big Halloween party with a costume contest, creepy sensory bins, spooky decorations, and room-to-room trick or treating. I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun. 😀
One of the major reasons I’m in the job field I am is my big brother. He has autism, OCD, and epilepsy. For a long time he wasn’t really into doing holiday-related activities. (In fact, for years my parents couldn’t put up a Christmas tree because in his opinion, that tree simply did not belong in the living room so it was coming down one way or another.) He’s come around though in recent years and even helped decorate the tree last year which was really nice. 🙂 Well, he’s embraced Halloween now, too, it seems. We got to decorate pumpkins together. I carved mine and he decorated his with paint and face stickers. He did such a great job and it was really cool getting to do that with him.
My pumpkin was supposed to be a pug face. Hopefully it looks sorta kinda like one. 😛 Anywhoooo, I hope you guys all have a fantastic Halloween! Are you doing anything fun today? What were your favorite Halloween activities you got to do this year?
Halloween Pugs & Pumpkins
Hey, guys! No, that’s not a picture of a goblin (although I do call him “my little goblin”), that is one of my parents’ pugs. I love taking cute photos of animals, although I will be the first to admit I am in no way a pro, but it’s fun and especially entertaining around the holidays. I thought I’d share some of my fave Halloween photos I’ve taken of the puggies from a couple years back.
Pugs and pumpkins! ❤
Playing in the fake cemetery.
Brutis getting a little overzealous in the graveyard.
Bebe paying her respects.
Spooky pugs guarding the cemetery gates. I made the spooky graveyard for a halloween party a few years back. It was a lot of fun. I think this devilish little duo got just as much enjoyment with it as the party-goers did. 😛
IgnitedMoth 