Brewfest! Whoo!

World of Warcraft has several festivals during the year, and today marks the start of one of my favorites: Brewfest!

Backstory: it's a celebration of the harvest (not to be confused with the Harvest Festival, which is more a memorial of fallen heros and a Day of the Dead-type thing), and what better way than with a festival featuring bread, pretzels, cheese, sausage, and most importantly, beer! Basically, it's WoW's version of Oktoberfest. And yeah, this all thought up by the dwarves - we know how they love their ale.

More importantly, it's a set of quests involving getting drunk (and hunting critters that can only be seen while drunk), riding rams, and hurling empty beer mugs at raiding Dark Iron Dwarves.... all of which can be repeated once a day.

So if I disappear for a few days, you now know why: the World has sucked me in once again.

Brewfest: Kusa tested... Kusa approved!

Sometimes Research is Gyaaaaaah

I put off this week's page of Strawberry Syrup as long as possible. It's one I've been dreading ever since it was conceived. Why, you ask? What could be so bad about this particular page?

I'm arachnophobic, and this page has a close up of a spider.

Just drawing a spider wouldn't be bad. I know from years of them dropping on me, crawling on me, and generally doing their best to freak me out what spiders look like from a distance. However, this was a close up, and like any responsible artist, rather than just wing it, I grit my teeth, braced myself, and headed over to deviantArt to check out spiders in the photography section.

Now, I'm not as bad as I used to be. A few years back, I went on an ill-thought-out canoe trip with two other people. I'd never been canoeing before... and it turned out that neither of the other people had any idea what they were doing. Fortunately, it was a calm river, but I had to learn fairly quick how to steer a canoe from the middle when the person in front kept strong-arming us into the shore with epically bad paddling skills.

During one of those collisions with driftwood and whatnot, a branch fell into the canoe. Turned out there must have been a spider convention on that branch, because five minutes later, once we're into the middle of the river and I've finally commandeered the other paddle from Captain Disaster and Person #3 has been worked up into a thorough panic, there were at least twenty small to medium size spiders crawling all over the boat.

Running away screaming was not exactly an option, and we already had one person near-hysterical, so I managed to keep my cool, ditch the branch, ignore or slay most of the spiders, and calm #3 down enough to follow directions. Since that day, I haven't felt that utter terror that used to accompany the mere thought of spiders.

That doesn't mean I like them or love looking at them.

Gyah. GYAAAAAH. I am so gonna have nightmares tonight! ><;;

New Box: Red Butterfly Believe

Okay, yeah, I know, I suck at naming things. I have a long storied history of pathetic attempts at titles. If anyone can think of a title that doesn't sound like some sort of J-Pop group, I'm open to suggestion! ^_^;;

Anyway, this is my latest box. It's made of sturdy cardboard - the kind used as a base for paper mache projects - and painted "tomato red." Add in some decorative paper, sparkly acrylic gems and a butterfly trinket, and voila! We have the Red Butterfly Believe Box.

It's about 5x5", which makes it a nice size to set on an end table with a vase of flowers or something. It's definitely more of an autumnal color scheme, which, hey, just in time for that season!

In the meantime, I need to figure out the shop's policies. Apparently, having that blank is a major red flag to other Etsy folk. Our policies are elsewhere on the page... however, they were written by my SIL awhile ago, so I need to find them and figure out if we need to cover anything else. Good times.