I love working for a company who employs hundreds of people. Everything's official, the boss can't change the rules on you, you get discounted commuter fare (I'll start that in December), and I get direct deposit. Insurance to follow, waving my COBRA bye bye. I punch in, which is interesting.

And I get to wear this snazzy headset. I fold my hands on the desk and talk to people on the phone. That's pretty cool. Delving into the pattern database is an adventure. Someone wants to go shopping, and I get to help them. Each order call is like a treasure hunt.

Many months back, he did a series of parodies of odd combinations of Trek characters on "The Weakest Link," like the kids (Icheb, Wesley, Charlie X, etc...) and so on. Well, the dimensions are about to collide. Robert Picardo aka ST Voyager's Holographic Doctor, is set to play on a celeb edition of said irritating gameshow from hell. To witless:

I was faced with this dilemma when I decided to sell the original color works I made for my website I, Holodoc. I studied and made pencil sketches, then inked and colored in the art. In a couple of instances, I went that far and stopped long enough to see something was funky with the results. We're talking hours of work for each. The successes were scanned, cleaned up, and given Photoshop backgrounds.

And these aren't very big. But they were no less meticulously executed. They're really nice IMHO. Even the rejects - someone's liable to like them, even if the eye on one of them's messed up.

There's one I don't want to sell. I know I need the money for resuming my holistic treatments and stuff - my health's been compromised since I stopped treatments, to the point that for the first time in 4 yrs, I've ADDED food allergies instead of gotten rid of them. So I've priced my favorite ridiculously high. If someone likes it enough to pay that, then power to them.

So like, I'm selling my soul to save my life.

I had trouble with this batch, and the fate of my future color pieces hangs in the meat locker of uncertainty.

See, this is how I color things: I use Aquabee 2-ply vellum bristol because it allows inks to blend and doesn't just slurp up the dyes and doesn't come apart like bad toilet paper when liquids touch it. Then, I used for a base Pelikan Tusche ink. A German company whose waterproof colored inks allow blending and gradation on the paper so long as they're still wet. Nice, subtle tones. Then over that I put Dr. Martin's dyes for the actual color of the part. Pelikan has gone out of business. Of the inks I have of theirs still, most are rancid and yechy and dead. I have only some good ones left. That real good pic I priced phenomenally was used with them. I used half and half for the base on the others. One was so bad I managed to salvage it with colored pencils, resulting in a nice pastel effect. Yes, a happy accident. Thank goodness!!!

btw: Is it just me, or does anyone else think that Adam Ant had problems filming his videos because he was consistently prettier than the models he cast in them? WAHAHAHAHA!!!

The pets during their photo shoot yesterday.