I know it's been a while, a hell of a lot has happened in the last few years during my hiatus, for me and for everyone obviously. I can't imagine having tried to remain in Los Angeles still under the financial stress I was under and then having the pandemic dropped on me as well. It was huge thanks to you all for helping me get out of there before I got stranded. I was able to move back to my hometown with just enough money for food until I was able to land a job in a grocery store which is where I've been ever since. It left me with no time or energy for art, but it slowly helped me rebuild some sort of stability that while fragile, got me through the fires in norcal and the pandemic so far. I can't say I'm back from my hiatus yet. But I'm at the point now where I've been able to slowly start drawing again. I don't have a lot of free time or energy but I'm chipping away slowly at my anxiety revolving around doing art and regaining the muscle memory and drawing confidence I need to start playing catch up. I've already reached out to a few people but it's going to be slow going before I can reach out to everyone. Just asking for a little more patience in doing this. I bit off more than I could chew the last few times I tried to catch up on overdue work and it sent me spiraling. Please let me set the pace in reaching out, I'll message people when I know my schedule is clear enough to add more to my plate. On top of my limited free time I'm a lot slower at drawing than I was when I burned out. Its coming back, but it feels like I use to be able to run marathons and now I get winded jogging around the block. I don't blame anyone who has written me off or given up. I'm still thankful for the support that was given to me for the amount of time I had it. I'm ever grateful to my friends and colleagues who checked in on me even when messages went unresponded to for months at a time. You kept me hopeful and motivated. I felt included in a community I feel like I'd abandoned. ____ I learned a lot during my hiatus, mostly about my own work habits and the ways having undiagnosed adhd crippled me as an adult. For some context: I started figuring it out in the final semester of my senior year at art school. By then I was just threads away from a mental breakdown. I didn't know whether I would graduate. I did, but it just increased my anxiety and imposter syndrome. I managed to get a few solid gigs but through bad project management I kept getting left with credits and nothing I could actually use in a portfolio. Suddenly I was 2 years graduated and unable to land work. I went back to doing commissions full time but I was already burning out and barely scraping by. The work hustle got harder, it got more difficult to create a separation of work and life, something I didn't really have much of to begin with. It quickly got to the point where I couldn't support myself where I was living, no savings left, and student loans coming for me. Because of working again in a field with set hours and accountability for my productivity, reflection on my past work habits, and just *time* I've started rebuilding a better healthier relationship with doing creative work in general. I hope to keep building on this as I steadily complete overdue work. I genuinely don't know that I'll ever return to doing commission work full time or part time. It just feels good to draw and create again. No promises though. Until I reach that point I'm just going to stick with completing overdue things as well as adoptables I started a few years ago and never finished. Maybe some worldbuilding again. ____ I hope everyone else still following me (or not) are doing well or the best they can given the circumstances we're all in. Please, take care of each other, and take care of yourselves. Do what you can with what energy you have. Know your limits and be as kind to yourself as your friends would.
Fire Season + Personal Update
EDIT: Sorry it's been so long. There's so much going on and when I last cleaned up and updated my computer it logged me out and I couldn't remember my password or get into the email my account was attached to. Was a bit low priority to go fix that. :') (Some of this is copied from my personal/vent update on twitter from last month but its still the most relevant info tbh)
Mid August: "Fuck dude we're off to a hell of a start in our fire season.. It's making me really fucking nervous. I still haven't really financially recovered from the Kincade Fire.. Covid related financial stress. I just spent what I had in reserve on vet bills. I put off paying my car registration for too long and that's the next thing I need to throw down for. I'm still in hella debt and haven't been able to touch my student loans. I hate doing this but I really really need to make sure I have some financial padding in case I need to evacuate.
I have a bunch of unfinished adopts in various stages of completion from the last 3+ years. I'm still working full time grocery and its barely enough to scrape by. What little time and energy I have outside of grocery work I'm gonna start trying to finish and sell old work.
I'm not asking for help, just a little more patience and understanding. I'm sorry you guys.. I know I've got a lot to make up for." (I didn't include the posts talking about the LNU Lightning Complex Fires. We more or less have made it to the other side of that situation.)
______
Current (September): All those photos of what northern california looks like right now are legit. It feels like nuclear winter here. I'm so financially strapped that even the money I have to spend to get through our first (and very short) PG&E Public Safety Planned Shutoff is setting me back more financially than I thought it would. Worse, there's a rumor in my workplace that we're going to lose our +$2 hazard pay. That's almost $500 less per month that was helping me try and get myself financially stable. Work has been so insane between people boredom shopping, panic shopping, holiday? shopping, and evacuation/planned shutoff shopping that I have barely had time to keep my house 'clean'. I'm getting better at managing how I spend my off-hours but it really boils down to not giving myself the decompression time I need to still feel like I'm a person and prioritizing keeping my household functional. The only real retreat I get is the 3 hours a week I play an online game to keep in touch with my brothers out of state. I hate it. I already stopped having anything resembling a life after jobs dried up for me in LA two years ago. I'm glad for the grocery work I do now. Its given me a chance to rebuild. I'm not miserable exactly. But all I'm doing is surviving and forward progress is so fragile. As of right now I still haven't taken care of my vehicle registration for the year. I had to replace my phone and I have to pay that off. Credit debt has piled up again and I gotta knock that down enough that I can use it to cover my car. I'll likely need to cover some dental work in the near future (before it becomes a problem). I need to update my contact prescription and get replacements before the pair I've been using for over a year ends up giving me an infection or something. Before the covid lockdowns I'd actually managed to get a few refunds issued. I'd planned on starting to contact a few others about options for resolving overdue commission work but I don't have the financial ability to do this anymore. If my situation improves by the time fire season is over I'll revisit this. For now I need to just build up any financial padding that I can. I'm an essential worker and my hours are steady. I don't qualify for any aid. Fire related aid doesn't cover my situation either unless I'm evacuated or my residence takes damage. I'm going to attempt to finish some old adoptables I'd started. I don't have the time or energy to make NEW work especially at the risk that it won't sell or that I won't be able to do more than break even. A lot of my unfinished adopts have felt like such wasted time over the last 4 years but I'm hoping I can change that. I want to have a clean slate again so badly. If I can make it through the next 6 months I think I might still have a chance to have that. I appreciate the offers I've gotten for new work but for the time being I can't take on anything new. My first priority is to try and cut my debt and build financial padding to get through fire season. Once I'm on the other side of that I can reassess where I'm at with handling overdue commissions. Short of me losing my job (if my place of work burns down or something or gets shut longterm for covid) I will not be taking on new work. You're free to dm me inquiries but I won't be replying to them anytime soon. Please be safe you guys. 2020 is a fucking train wreck.
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The only reason I'm not homeless or worse and even have a chance of recovering from this debt I'm in is because I got help when Toby got sick again and he had to be put down. I don't wanna see anyone else struggle in that either. Its hard enough just the idea of losing a companion like that.
KINCADE FIRE - safe
Back. Finally got my computer and stuff set up again. Everyones fine. We got super lucky with how thoroughly prepared our county was for this event. Even still, it could have gone very very badly. Energy is sapped pretty hard from the stress and vigilance. Our store was still open for the majority of it though we didn't get to work our full hours. We spent a lot of it emptying the freezers to save the products from going bad and later moving it all back in. Store has been extra busy with everyone who normally shops here back to replace everything they lost during the blackouts. It's going to take me a week or more to fully unpack again. At least work routine is back to normal. It's going to take me a month or more to recover financially though. With everything I lost in my own fridge, the loss of work hours, the downtime from my computer being packed away, food and necessities purchased during the evacuation, and having to replace my nearly-bald car tires to ensure safe escape if I needed to flee... I'm three months behind where I was last month. I'm not happy about it. I'm alive, but things continue to suck. Not giving up obv.
1:30pm — (sorry I forgot to date this entry rip)
On edge, haven’t slept hardly at all. Everything important to me that would be too difficult to replace is packed in my car. Last night was particularly scary when the fire jumped containment. This fire is twice the size of Tubbs. It would have been far far worse without the voluntary power outages. The preemptive evacuations saved countless lives and made the job of first responders indefinitely easier than it otherwise would have been. For now I’m safe, my house and my housemates are fine as is my workplace but we still have one more high wind event to get through before it’s over this time around. We will undoubtably have more Diablo/Santa Ana winds this season. SoCal is in line to get hit hard next. Please be sensitive towards making any assumptions about wildfire and ecology management. This is not a simple issue.
This next wind wind event has potential to be very bad considering where the fire boundaries are right now. Even once the event is passed there’s still a likelihood I won’t be able to go back home for days.
11:38am -- Initial post
Posting this as a deviation so I can lock comments. I don't need assurances, advice, or sympathies. This is purely so I have a digital footprint of what is happening around me in case something happens.
I'm off work early. Not much to do since we're anticipating power being cut. We didn't even restock the refrigerators. Afternoon crew is going to be getting ready to put everything we have left back into the refrigerated vans. I'm skeptical about going to work. I know I won't be sleeping. I'm going to try and take a nap now while I still can but I know the next few days are going to be very sleepless. I'm not in the evacuation area right now but I was up all night making myself familiar with the predicted wind events and I'm really fucking nervous. The three main cities in immediate line of fire are evacuating as we speak. For good reason they aren't taking any chances. There is nothing but dry fuel between this fire and wherever the wind takes it.
I'm packing everything important right now preemptively. I already have an evac plan at least for the short term. Will keep posted as necessary. If you are in Norcal please follow your local CALFIRE branch on twitter and keep your phones charged. Do not wait until the last minute to act. Take your animals with you. Check on your friends and neighbors. PG&E has been silent despite their promise of a definitive blackout time.
Precautionary blackouts part 2
Just got done yesterday evening with the latest outage. We'll be having another one saturday but they don't know for how long. This time the blackout zones are far more expansive. The predicted winds are going to be faster and longer than the previous as well. The blackouts are fucking over our local economy and small businesses really bad. People are nervous. There's a huge fire that's barely 5% contained in the city north of us and they've got that ground because of the lull in the winds. When those winds kick up it's going to get bad. I imagine in a day or two we'll be needing masks for the smoke. I'll keep updated when I can. Local cell providers have installed generators at many of their cell towers so reception has greatly improved during the blackouts since the first one. Not enough to use netflix or anything but good enough that I can fairly consistently access PG&E updates, news, etc.
Extremely tired from grocery work. On top of making sure we complete our usual duties now we're doubling as emotional support and providers of normalcy in the middle of all this. A lot of the more rural and elderly residents rely heavily on our store. Many people had to learn for the first time, to their surprise, that power will go out again saturday. Communication about that hasn't been very clear. All I know is PG&E and city work crews are running around like mad trimming trees in as many of the high risk zones they can get to.
Anyway.. yeah.
PS. Ice trick only works for a day and does not work in 100F weather. Instead we've been focusing on non perishables and eating fresh food the same day.
So yeah. A little shorter notice than last time. So far no update on the WHEN. Just sometime wednesday afternoon. Gonna cry if I have to throw out a lot of the groceries I JUST GOT TO REPLACE WHAT I LOST LAST TIME. Sinking a huge amount of money into bouncing back from that. I really really can't afford to do this a third time, not without a good month's worth of pay to try and stay in the green. The moment the rains start I have to replace my tires too. I don't have the money to deal with both right now much less any other surprises. Hnggg. /vent/
Previous update for context
life update - also california fire risk zoneUPDATE 10/13:
Got power back late thursday night. Got lucky. Lot of my hometown was still without power. Most of my town has power again as does the majority of Cali.
Store ended up staying open even though we didn't have power. We worked with flashlights and headlamps. We lost a LOT of product in the refrigerators/cold cases. Saved the rest with refrigerated trucks but the whole store had help take everything perishable off the shelves asap. Saturday we had to get it all back on the shelves again AND still do our normal stocking since people were rushing in to get non perishables to tide their families over. Saturday and Sunday we hustled hard to keep refilling the non perishables. People coming to replace spoiled condiments, jam/pb, pickles, etc. I think I put up 200+ units of mayonnaise each day. @__@ Monday is gonna be rough since we're getting a huge load of freight to fill everything back to normal capacity. So much for getting to rest. Weekend is coming up though. Hopefull