Long time, no journal but I got some great news! I can now officially say that I am employed again! I had my second interview yesterday and everything went great. I'll be working the same job my mom has and it looks like I'll be doing my training this coming Tuesday. I'm one giant leap closer toward independence though it will still be a while until I have enough money saved up until I can even begin truly making plans on moving out. Thank you everyone who has given me support in my quest to get employed again in this struggling economy, I really appreciated every kind and motivating word that was said. I feel as though a large weight is being lifted off my shoulders now.

In other good news, I now have a good printer/scanner. I've been needing one of those for a while to get my little art studio running more efficiently. I'm not a perfect artist and I am prone to make inking and coloring mistakes from time to time. I prefer to scan my penciled work, save it, and print out a copy to ink and color just in case I make a mistake so that way I don't screw up the original. If I do screw up, all I need to do is print out a new copy. Sure, making a mistake still sucks but at least I don't have to redo the penciling as well and ruin a good art piece permanently. For years I had to drive over to Professor Awesome's house to use his printer/scanner to safely do art and even to upload and that ate up my gas something fierce. Now that I got a printer/scanner, I'll be saving a load of money on gas (good timing too since my car has a gas leak now) but I'll still need to spend some on ink occasionally. On top of that, I can easily send Professor Awesome new Demordicai Diamonds pages to do the digital touch-up work on through the internet if I'm here working at home, once again saving me a lot of gas money. Yay!

Now if I can only solve the near constant pestering I get from my family whenever I try to sit down and do art work. I guess the solution for that will come when I have enough money to move out. I haven't been able to do much art work nor comic work due to my brothers and my mom being off from work for 9 days at a time and just bugging the crap out of me day and night. If it isn't one brother stealing my money (lost $40 that way and my mom tried to hide the fact that it was my eldest brother who waited until I was at my sister's house to come in and steal it), another brother constantly trying to get something out of me be it transportation, money, or some other stuff and ranting, whining, and bitching about the stupidest drama even worse than a teenage girl, its my mom becoming as technologically obsessed as she is ignorant of technology and demanding me to teach her but refuses to listen and learn. That last one has been of a particular bother as of late. My mom is now OBSESSED with Facebook and the internet but she barely understands how to type in a url (like www. stuff) as well as the concept of logging in and out. Trying to explain it to her is near impossible and I really don't appreciate her uber-demanding "do EVERYTHING for me" attitude. Combine that with her yelling, shrieking and disregard for anyone sleeping and you end up with a very cranky me.

Who knows, now that I have a job this usual and annoying crap that I've been forced to deal with for years may soon (relatively speaking) become a thing of the past. I predict a lot of drama from my parents when the time is right and I can leave and live on my own but it will be SO worth it. My sister went through the same thing when she moved out and out of all of my siblings, she has been the only one who is fairly well off at the moment. She's been really supportive of me getting this job and even helped out with getting me some car insurance for my old station wagon. She's been through the same stuff that I'm going through now and understands my plight here better than that rest of my family and I am extremely thankful for her help.

Speaking of my sister, we had some adventures recently. For some reason beyond my comprehension, she has been very determined to get herself a dog, specifically a Teacup Yorkie. I agreed to accompany her on a quest to pick one up about half-way across the state. It's a bit of a drive but not too bad...until we ran into major road closings and got lost with the detours. The lady who was selling the dog (and wanted at least $500 for it, outrageous for a dog in my opinion but my sister REALLY wants one so whatever, it's her money) didn't want to meet us half way and didn't give us good directions so it took us all day to find her, She had a really arrogant attitude and had pretty much converted her whole trailer into a kennel. Ugh, it smelled really bad but she must really like breeding dogs. So once we got the Yorkie and started the drive home, the dog started throwing up on me over and over again. It's only 4 months old so I figure maybe it was carsick seeing how is probably never been in a car before. I come to learn more recently from my sister that the dog isn't eating now. I bet my sister will be pissed off bad should that dog end up dying. I would be too, sucks when pets die, especially pets of the $500 variety.

The day after the Yorkie adventure, I agreed again to accompany my sister on another pet-related quest against my better judgement. I wasn't too happy wasting all day on the Yorkie adventure when it was only supposed to take four or five hours at most. But this time there was something in it for me that I've been needing: A new rooster. My sister somehow finds these people selling things locally online and found someone selling a rooster so I couldn't help but be aboard for this one. My sister one the other hand wanted to get ducks. Yes, ducks. My mom used to have ducks as pets several years ago but they got eaten by coyotes so my sister wanted to get some more for my home, not hers. So we ended up getting two ducks and me holding a new rooster on my lap. We got hungry and she wanted to go through a McDonald's drive through in town and we caused quite a stir when they saw me in the passenger seat holding a foot-tall rooster. All the workers there started to gather around the window to see the rooster (his name is the Colonel, inspired by the KFC next to the McDonald's). On top of that, my sister ordered a McChicken. So now my hens have the new boytoy they've been wanting and have been all too "eager" for. Seriously, it's disgusting. I guess though that the Colonel isn't exactly what they had in mind, they all run from him. He is considerably bigger than they are. I'd probably be intimidated by a giant cock running toward me too. And there's the obligatory cock joke. Lol, that story was very difficult to type without making everything a cock joke.

Before I got news of my employment, I originally intended to do a small journal entitled "Purple Hot Dogs" due to the story I'm about to tell now. A while back ago, my parent's gave my middle brother $20 to clean out the refrigerator. What does he do? He takes the money, spends it on pot, and leaves the house out to some of his friends to hang out there for a while all without doing the job he was paid to do. Not the first time but my parents never learn. I had previously cleaned all the rest of the kitchen myself and the refrigerator was the only task to be done. Now my parents and brothers are notorious for being ridicuoulsy stupid when it comes to food. My parent's rarely ever buy enough or they end up buying loads of terribad tasting "bottom of the barrel" food that is no one will eat. On top of that, they don't understand the concept of sealing food to preserve it and keep the mice out. The mice (which they don't see as a major problem) had gotten into a lot of the food in the kitchen and as you can probably imagine, contaminated it to a point to where it probably wouldn't be wise to eat it. Bubonic plague, anyone? So I had to toss a lot of food since the glories of plastic and metal containers are not sung in my house. I finished my job and my brother got a smaller but equally important job which he promptly toot the money and ran. So a few days later when my sister came over and my brother was keeping out of sight and away from the refrigerator that awaited his cleaning duties, my sister started to complain of a horrid stench emanating from the kitchen. I went to take a look inside and did my brother's job and what I found disgusted and amazed me at the same time. I found purple hot dogs, blue (NEON BLUE) chili, and salad that had liquified to a brown goop. I don't know even where to begin to describe the smell that came from those contents but it was bad. I hate seeing wasted food in my house but my parents for the life of them can't understand why food goes bad when exposed to oxygen. Tupperware would go a long way here should it's glorious light of food storage ever shine down on this falling apart house. Before anyone asks, no, I didn't attempt to eat any of the funky-colored foods. Would have been great to use for a "Tell me if this smells bad" prank but that might be going a little too far.

Now as for artwork, I haven't got much done at all as you can probably tell. I've been wanting to but as mentioned above, it's been hard as hell to sit down and draw without having something or someone to deal with. I still have Demordicai Diamonds Page 72 laying around waiting to be finished. The only real progress I have to report on Demordicai Diamonds is just story work me and Professor Awesome have collaborated on over the phone and that's pretty much it. Big stuff story-wise, Rune and Dalken get to go on a royal excursion and deal with nobility in their own ways and old, bloody mysteries of Relma are demystified with some help of an old, supposedly vanished acquaintance who makes a reappearance in a state of political asylum.

That's all for me this journal. I'm still alive even though I haven't done much artwork recently. It's really nice to finally be able to type up a journal where good news outweighs bad news. I've been waiting to type a journal like this for a long, long time. Thanks again to everyone who has been supportive of me during my multi-year job hunt!