This weeks Sunday Sketch is brought to you by: cats.
I swear this is me sketching roughs for a freelance project and not just what I spend my weekends doing. Really. I’m serious.
Category: Uncategorized
Caturday #18.
Lazy Caturday.
Caturday #17.
In honor of Mother’s Day, a photo from 2012 – when I became a proud cat Mama.
Distance.
Caturday #16
Don’t look behind you. (The lighting made her eyes two different colors.)
Adiversitising
No, that’s not a typo – it’s a word I just made up, combining “advertising” and “diversity”.
There’s been a rise of diversity that has been creeping into advertising over the past year or so. From various companies being more proactive in featuring average body types into their clothing ads, to Cheerios featuring an interracial couple in their commercial, to an artist doing casts of disabled folks as mannequins in store front windows. Being that I work in an advertising agency, I find these things interesting.
Today I came across the new Swiffer ad for the first time, featuring not only an interracial family, but a father who is an amputee. Although it mentions his arm in terms of needing a cleaning tool that is easy to use with one hand, the commercial doesn’t feel like it’s trying to hard. It’s a real family (I looked them up) and they’re just like the rest of us, and I like that the commercial portrays it as such. It gives me hope that maybe we’ll see this sort of diversity pop up in advertising more often and that we won’t pause to question it.
That being said, the real reason I love the new Swiffer commercial – it shows the man doing the cleaning. FINALLY!
Caturday #15.
We moved over the weekend, out of a place we have lived for the past seven years and where Ghost has lived her whole two years. She is not the happiest camper at the new place. I feel like a terrible Cat Mom, when she meows every time I leave her sight and hides anytime both The Boy and I leave the apartment. When we return, she won’t come out until we call her name and she’s positive it’s us.
The first two days she didn’t sleep and was barely eating or drinking. Today, she seems to be doing better – as evidenced by the photo. She’s actually napping (the pile of pillows I put on the couch helps), as long as I’m sitting next to her, and she’s finally drinking the water I put out for her. I know she’ll get used to it, I just still feel bad. She’s never been this needy.
“In the Shakespearean comedies, the wedding is the end, and there isn’t much indication of what happily ever after will look like day to day. In real life, shouldn’t a wedding be an awesome party you throw with your great pal, in the presence of a bunch of your other friends? A great day, for sure, but not the beginning and certainly not the end of your friendship with a person you can’t wait to talk about gardening with for the next forty years.”
I came across this quote today, while reading Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling and I really liked it. I don’t claim to know anything about marriage or how to make it work, but it completely rings true to what I’ve been saying I want my wedding to be since the day we got engaged. I don’t care about formalities or traditions; I’m not looking to impress anyone. The designer in me cares about it being pretty, and not like the Dollar Store threw up my decorations, but as for the actual affair itself – I just want it to be me and The Boy committing to each other the love we already know we share and celebrating that with the people really close to us.
I don’t expect our relationship to change, we’ve been together six years so we’re clearly already committed. I don’t expect this to be the holy grail at the end of the dating quest. I expect, really, that things will keep going as they have been – except we’ll be sharing a name, a bank account and I’ll probably be really sappy for awhile because I love him so much and am excited to marry him.
We’ll still go on being ourselves. We’ll keep doing our thing. We’ll hang out with our friends, we’ll play with our cat, we’ll giggle at each others stupid jokes and we’ll keep annoying each other when we can’t be decisive. We’ll just be doing it officially married.
PAX East 2014
Since 2010, The Boy and I have had the tradition of visiting Boston in the Spring to attend PAX East.
For those of you who don’t know, it’s the Penny Arcade Expo – it’s three wondrous days of nerd glory with exclusive access to upcoming video games, from indie mobile start-up companies to the really big names like Rockstar, Bethesda and Ubisoft.
This past weekend marked our fourth year attending (we had tickets for 2011, but were unable to attend due to being in the hospital and all that inconvenient stuff) and it was definitely a different experience than before. It’s always a fun time, I absolutely LOVE Boston and love being in Boston, but every year PAX sells more tickets without expanding their space. At the risk of sounding super hipster, I will go ahead and say that the first year, before everyone knew about it, was by far the best.
It’s become very commercialized, with sponsers having their own booths and they seem to be less organized with each passing year, which results in a lot of capping lines and 4 hour waits if you decide to get into one of those lines. Who wants to spend 4 hours waiting to play ONE game? The first year we attended PAX, the longest we waited was 2 hours – and that was to play Red Dead Redemption, a highly anticipated game in the industry. If Red Dead Redemption were there this year, we wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere near it.
View from the walkway over the center of the hall.
The only upside to it being so incredibly packed was that we spent a lot of time in the Indie section of the hall and got to test some great, upcoming games from smaller developers. It was still a good time, just definitely not the best year we’ve had there. That being said, outside of the convention – it was one of my favorite experiences of the city of Boston itself! We usually end up staying in the Back Bay area, which is lovely, but this year we stayed in the North End – the Little Italy of Boston.
I have never seen so many Italian restaurants on one street, including two pastry shops across the street from each other who are apparently engaged in some sort of cannoli feud. And it is a very historical section of the city. We ate and drank at some taverns built in the 1700s, we saw Paul Revere’s house. We took a few walks at night just to explore the area and there were times you’d turn a corner and if you just removed the cars parked on the cobblestone streets, you’d feel you were transported back to the 18th century.
The atmosphere was so beautiful there. I took a nap before dinner one evening and awoke to the lulling ambient noises of diners on a warm evening, the soft glow of the lamplight peeking through the blinds and soothing Italian melodies drifting up from an accordion player beneath my window.
I don’t think we’ll be attending the convention next year, as it’ll be cutting it very close to the wedding, but the next time we’re in Boston my vote will definitely be to stay in the North End again. And this time I’ll have to pick my side in the cannoli war.
Caturday #14.
The 8th was Ghost’s 2nd birthday, so here’s a picture of her as a tiny baby
(with her brothers Boots, the orange one, and Nymbus, who is the white blur escaping the basket)
sarah kennedy // konfusedfae 