Category: Horrordailies

Eye Candy

I’ve long put off doing something with my home office. All I have in a 9’5 x 11′ room is an L-desk, a file cabinet, and a salvaged printer table.

When the exterminator came by today for routine maintenance, one of the ladies in the rental office glanced in and I felt shame, so MUCH Libra shame. So I did what any good Libra would do and rationalize a little shopping spree by noting that it’s a three-paycheck month. Now I have a dark red and black traditional Oriental rug and a 55-inch black console table coming. I’ll get artwork after the rug arrives to see what colors will work best. I keep my office dimly lit, with warm light bulbs, so probably something in fall colors.

I didn’t stop there, though. I bought artwork for over my bed and a four-piece set of birdie artwork for somewhere in the living room. They’re 12-inch square so while they are long enough to take up the necessary space with three inches between them to fill the two-thirds rule of how wide artwork should be over a sofa, they might not be tall enough. If so, I will hang them in a square in the dining area.

Yes, I’ve been living without artwork in my apartment for about nine years now. Why? Because I got rid of all of the stuff I had when I moved back to Virginia in 2015 as it was all given to me by people I didn’t want to be reminded of in my new life. I also hate clutter, as my ex-husband was a slob (one of the reasons for the divorce—nope, signed up to be a wife, not a maid) and my ex-boyfriend was somewhere between a level 1 and a level 2 hoarder (living in the same zip code was enough for me).

A couple of years ago I started going to galleries and looking for paintings, but as much as I wanted to and could finally afford it, I just couldn’t bring myself to plunk down $2,000 or $3,000 on a piece of art for fear of getting it home and then finding that it wasn’t a good size or it just didn’t work with my furniture, color scheme, or light.

So hello canvas prints from small businesses on Amazon! If they work, great! If they don’t, no harm, no foul. I’m only out a couple hundred bucks and I can offer them to friends who might like them. I do know the bird art will work, because bird art will ALWAYS work in my home, but not sure about the abstract I bought for over the bed.

I also figured out where I’m going to hang artwork given to me in recent years by people I do want in my life, as well as smaller pieces I’ve picked up over the years and just never hung, like this beauty, “A Study of Riddles,” by Apollo the Crow at Diva Crows:

I don’t believe Apollo has been painting lately, or, if he has, Diva Crows has stopped selling his artwork, so I’m super glad I got one of his last commissions. He’s still alive and well as far as I know, though.

Another great thing about this painting is the fabric Diva Crows used to wrap it:

Yes, those are eyeballs in the roses. What lovely mix of romance and Hitchcockian terror! Fortunately, I’m on the good side of the Crows who live on the property, having kept them in peanuts for a couple of years now.

And now for today’s candy: Gummy Eyeballs! Fortunately, these were not around when I was a kid or I might very well have turned out even more warped than I did.

Clink, Clink

I’m kind of not feeling this project this year. It’s likely because we’ve been short-staffed at work for the better part of the last eight months, largely because a prior director had no business managing other people or their workflows, and I’m hella burned out so I don’t feel like writing yet more at the end of the day.

That may or may not change as I have two three-day weekends in a row, but I wonder what the point of all of this is as I get so few hits and almost comments. I’m thinking ProseBox should have been the place to do this.

In keeping with my current mood of “blah,” here is the thing I most disliked getting for Halloween when I was a kid: Pennies.

Like, what was a seven-year-old going to do with that in 1973? I wasn’t old enough to go somewhere on my bike and spend it, and the candy you could get for a penny or two back then was more tease than satisfaction, like one mini Tootsie Roll from a bunch that the guy at the mom-and-pop grocery store sold loose in an old baseball-card box because one of the bags in his candy shipment was open. I hope no one still gives out pennies. That’s just plain trolling little kids at this point.

Seasonal Simplicity

Long brutal day and pressed for time, so I’m using one of my traditional safety entries, which is to share my current, seasonal wallpaper, downloaded from DesktopNexus.

In keeping with the theme of simplicity, chocolate balls are today’s candy. Like their Christmas and Easter counterparts, they’re wrapped in foil. One thing I remember about them is that sometimes part of the foil was actually in the chocolate, like the chocolate began to melt and then hardened around the edge of the foil.