Money money money...

Paycheque to-dos:
Buy bus ticket to Edmonton: $129.00
Pay Ashley back: $10.00
Payment on phone bill: $100.00
Buy Gym pass: $27.50

Total: $266.50

I get one more paycheque before I leave for Edmonton and hopefully I will have my credit card organized by the end of this week. Am looking forward to this trip more than I can say - saying goodbye to Har today was painful and it's eased a little knowing that it's not going to even be a month before I get to see her again.

Love and Kisses,
Angel

Complications

I've been struggling alot with my mental and physical health this year. It's been a rough year and everytime I turn around my body is rebelling against me just to make things harder.

I've been trying to make sure that I spend lots of time around people I feel safe with. I need the physical contact, it keeps me grounded. I worry alot that I'm going to overwhelm people, but not being around people leaves me feeling lost. I don't know what to do about it. I don't want to drive people away.

Luckily, I have one person who lives right around the corner from me and is more than ok with being a cuddle-buddy. And my lovely lady is in town this week, got to spend lots of cuddle and play time with her on Monday night. I'm all marked up from our play time *giggles* and have other lovely marks from my cuddle-buddy. I can't really call him a f*ck buddy because we haven't been that far yet. *shrugs* We'll see.

Love and Kisses,
Angel

Never-never Land

I’m beginning to feel like this is never going to happen. I was doing ok when I first started school, especially since we had only lost John a month earlier, and then I had that break down and was in the hospital for a week, and ever since I barely have the will to get out of bed in the morning.

I dropped another huge handful of goals today because everytime I looked at the list I got so overwhelmed. There’s so much I told myself I could do when I started here and now almost everything centers around getting better. Losing weight, exercising, sleeping better, getting over things… nothing but steps towards my mental health improving. If it ever does.

See more progress on: Beat my depression

Pink Hair, Parties and Photographs...

So I've been up to quite alot the last few weeks. I've been photographing up a storm for school and for my own personal amusement, I've dyed my hair pink (again lol) and fought with my own will to grow it long again.

I'm also in the process of planning a huge 21st birthday party for this saturday. We've spent alot of time cleaning up the yard and house, quite alot of things that needed to be done anyways but we'd gotten behind on after my stepfather died. It's going to be super pretty - I'm having a masquerade party in our backyard, we're going to set up lights and have a barbeque. I've ordered two differant sized cakes from Save-On and we're going to tier them when we pick them up on Saturday, then line the edges and add the mask to the top.

I bought my own mask for the party today, it's a spiraled metal mask from Dressew with big spirals coming up the sides. I'm stoked!

And now... photos!

Expression: Shorty doing Colby's make-up for their show at Surrey Pride 2009


Bound by Duty: Connor at a Black Parade meeting prior to the Surrey Pride show

Perfect Simplicity: Dayel, little sister of a friend of mine for a Children and Family assignment.

"Hey... I can hear the ocean!": Photoshoot with Nemo and Euvie, just for fun.

Beauty Redefined: Euvie during the same photoshoot.


Love and Kisses,

Andro Angel

Updates...

So I finally got my second tattoo. Curved script now runs across my collar, reading "There are those who give with pain, and that pain is their Baptism. It's flaking pretty bad on the left side ("with pain" and "Baptism" are looking like they'll need to be touched up alot) which sucks since I've been damn careful to take really good care of it. But I'm totally in love with it AND my tattoo artist. Will probably get all my font work done by him - I want to get my little sister's name on my left wrist above my "water" kanji, and "No Regrets" above the "fire" kanji on my right wrist, as well as the curling patterns around this tattoo and the matching wrist bands for my kanji.

In other news, I've started belly dancing again and holy pain and death! I thought I'd fall over, I'd forgotten how hard it was! And I have an amazing lady coming to visit in August - she's coming to Vancouver for pride the first of the month and I get to steal her for a whole day and night of her ten day visit, although I'm going to try very hard to steal her extra *evil grin*

I'm working on something that I'm not going to talk too much about until the end of this semester at school and then I'll explain in full.

I cleaned my room tonight. Spent five hours just working my ass off and getting it done. I want it to look awsome for my lovely lady's visit, and for my birthday the week before she gets here. It's been such a nasty stressful thing for me to have this gross dirty room so it was nice to get it done. I'm doing my office tomorrow as well as tidying the bathroom. I just want my spaces to be livable. The house is finally looking livable again and Mum and I have just been working so hard to make it that way.

Anyways, I should head to bed.

Love and Kisses,

Andro Angel

43 Things

I must admit I've recently gotten quite into all these different networking sites - especially sites like Twitter that require very little participation on my part, and allow me to make instant updates to what I'm doing, link to practically every device on the planet (see my sidebar? You love my sidebar, admit it), and most recently through a site called 43 Things, make goals and track my progress.

I think of all the networking sites currently in existence, 43 Things is my favorite. I have always struggled with goals, mostly because keeping them in perfect list form was exhausting. Then you have to track down the list and you don't get to keep it as neatly organized as 43 things enables you to do. It also limits you (as you might have guessed, to 43 goals) so that you're not making a ridiculous list that you could never in a million years complete. It gives you the option of adding a specific "challenge" - a single goal that you're going to focus on for a set period of time. That goal stays as your challenge until you either complete it or give up, and if you give up, you have a consequence that you set that you have to follow through on. Right now I'm challenging myself to lose 30 lbs before October 30th (my baby sister's due date).

Currently my 43 goals are:

	1.	Lose 30 pounds
	2.	Start belly dancing again
	3.	Learn yoga
	4.	Live in Germany for a year
	5.	Beat my depression
	6.	Become more earth friendly
	7.	Stretch everyday (on top of Yoga)
	8.	Complete my photography course with high marks
	9.	Get my second tattoo
	10.	Drink more water
	11.	Stop hurting myself when I'm unhappy
	12.	Get over what happened to me as a child
	13.	Learn to sew
	14.	Get a Nikon D700
	15.	Get more involved in gender issues
	16.	Stop eating/drinking junk
	17.	Be an amazing aunt to my niece or nephew
	18.	Spend more time with my Dad
	19.	Learn to play the guitar
	20.	Cook more, eat out less
	21.	Make the most of the time left with my elderly dog
	22.	Get my writing published
	23.	Try to re-discover the joy of little things
	24.	Learn a second language
	25.	Exercise three days a week
	26.	Grow my hair long
	27.	Do something once a month that terrifies me
	28.	Take a spiritual retreat
	29.	Perform in a Shakespeare play
	30.	Meditate everyday
	31.	Work on being less co-dependant on my mother
	32.	Work in the garden every weekend
	33.	Learn ballroom dancing
	34.	Give blood
	35.	Start sleeping normal hours every night
	36.	Organize my room and office
	37.	Go to Thailand for the summer
	38.	Purge myself of unnecessary possessions
	39.	Get my website online
	40.	Teach a gender workshop
	41.	Finish all my half-completed paintings
	42.	Become a better listener
	43.	Get myself in good enough shape to do ballet again

Love and Kisses,
Andro Angel