#i've spent a lot of the last three weeks struggling with digital drawing to get out enough eggs for all people i wanted to gift them to

[undertheopensky]

How do you send those Easter eggs to people?

Well first the person you're sending to has to have their ask box open! And they *also* have to have images permitted in asks, not everyone does due to some people being Unfortunately Too Creepy For Society.

If both these prerequisites are met then you just open up an ask and click the red 'attach a photo' icon in the top right corner, then 'upload image' on the left and select your chosen egg, include a holiday message, then send!

[frogsandfries]

I feel like I should just leave. I know leaving Wisconsin without my license or much for savings will put me essentially in the same position that made me feel forced to return, but after today's shift, I don't work again until Thursday. I got turned down for the position I really wanted, so now I'm pursuing a kind of Plan B/C.

I just need some solid time out of the house, but I don't have much control over where I can go.

My friend's daughter just the other day threw a tantrum because she thought the teacher was trying to trick her with three-digit division. She never wants to think for herself-- she spent several minutes yelling "hey siri hey siri" and verbally entering her homework into her phone, sure to try to check her math, but it annoyed me. Use your fucking hands and use the fucking calculator. Why does a ten-year-old have a fucking iPhone anyway?? I don't care if it's a fucking iPhone one or whatever, she clearly doesn't need it. She doesn't want to fucking think for herself. And of course, she sat down right in my doorway throwing her temper tantrum baby fit. I told her, why would your teacher try to trick you by giving you graded homework without the skills to do it?

She's seriously pissing me off and I know it's not her fault; she's not the one giving herself everything she asks for. She's not inherently the reason she owns more scrunchies than one child should have. Her mother is failing her.

And then there's her mother, the last person in my life who I've known since we were in middle school. The person giving her ten-year-old an iPhone and everything she asks for. The person who doesn't follow politics and uses disposable plates when she only has one kid. My family had four kids and we used reusable plates. The person who has me bitterly wishing that I could live day to day and not try to think about bettering my future; that I could happily, mindlessly consume, consume, consume, work to the last possible day, and be happy to be little more than an unpaid cog in the corporate machine.

But that's not how life works. You don't get to just choose to not vote, and then benefit from it. You shouldn't. I know that's hypocritical of me, but 2016 was a bad time for me personally, being technically homeless and unable to get to the place my ID said I was allowed to vote. And honestly, I haven't benefited. I haven't used food stamps since like 2014--unlike my friend who basically has struggled to figure out how to get by with two good incomes (apparently) but no food stamps.

My sister told me, nothing that happens in the household is my business, but when I'm giving a quarter of my income, when the agreement was I would keep my full income, and her daughter is throwing tantrums in front of my door, and they're off going to Dave and Buster's and spending money they don't have, it's hard not to feel like it's my money that they're using to have fun while I'm damn near killing myself.

And here I am, too little, but hopefully not too late, looking for a second job to see to it that the shit that's happening to me right now, where I'm working like twenty hours for the next couple weeks because I only have one job, won't continue to drag me down. I don't recall my hours getting cut last year during the holiday season, and I get that I was working a different industry in a different region, but I can't afford to lose money like this. Sure, a couple weeks, okay maybe, not really; but this is looking like more than a couple weeks.

I hate that everyone makes such a big deal of the holidays and I'm ready to dive in head-first and just have a second job. Apparently food service is my best bet. Not that we have anything remotely like what I was doing in Arizona 🙄

Anyway. Let's talk about something that's less stressful.

I feel like I talk about this a lot, but being able to draw the outlines of my cross-stitch patterns on my tablet, and then fill my patterns on the bus really helps me feel like I'm pushing my project forward in time that would otherwise be wasted. I even do it on my lunch breaks, occasionally. I can even do it if I'm just having an off evening, and I feel like I have a lot of those lately, with it being winter and me working a job that goes against my natural sleeping pattern.

So far, I think I've finished two or three patterns that otherwise I might not have had the time for. Unfortunately, I have a couple patterns that need a little tweaking/adjustment and then I should get around to formatting these completed patterns. I'm still thinking about publishing a series of ebooks with the patterns and maybe photos of my cross-stitched pieces. Maybe I'll release my cross-stitched pieces as a separate collection. I also want to clean up my lineworks digitally and release that as a coloring book, maybe.