For too long, I've been sorta wallowing in the fact that I'm not very good at having fun. I'm really a pretty conservative sorta guy, with even more conservative finances, and these two facts can tend to limit you quite a bit. But recently I've been trying to make myself get into the spirit of saying 'yes' to stuff, rather than finding excuses to say 'no'. I've only really been doing it for a few weeks now, but already I've noticed a marked upturn in my general enjoyment of life. True, my finances have taken a wee bit of a beating as a result, but I can sorta justify that since I know that I'm gonna have some more money coming in soonish, so I can replenish the coffers a bit. It's a good thing tho, cuz I've had so many people say to me lately that I'm 'looking well' or that I seem to be a lot happier than they've been used to seeing me for the past few years, and that can't be a bad thing.

Of course, good things happening can really help put a terrific upswing on your mood, and this week particularly has been a good week. Started off finally getting to chat with my best mate Lisa, who's been in foreign parts since the end of last year, and I haven't been able to get thru to her on the phone. I also got 4 pages of pose sketches (that's 32 poses) done for a tatoo I'm designing for someone, and I'm thinking once the tat's done, I might just do a series of mermaid pics, cuz I quite like some of the poses. But the week had more to come - on Wednesday I found out that Jamie's lined up a 2-issue comic for us to colour, with art by none other than Mike Kalutta (don't know any more details yet, tho), which will be my first full-issue colouring gig (even tho I'll be splitting the duties with Jamie, but that's been the plan for a while now anyway). A mate at work gave me first refusal on a d-SLR he was selling, and the price was good, so I figured I'd be daft not to grab it, so I now have a Canon EOS 300D (yeah, I know Alun, you owe me slaggings! ). Then I was asked to colour another regular strip for Wasted [link] (first issue goes on sale May 17th), so I'll likely now be doing regular Black Cape [link] and Omniscient Zorgo strips in that. Then this morning I logged in here, only to find that my entry to Artgerm's Pepper Project has made the final list, and I'm gonna be in the book! What a great week! And it doesn't end there - sometime today I'll be heading round to check out a kid's rom I'm gonna be painting some cartoon characters on (which will pay for the camera), then tonight I'm going along to my mate Amy's [link] regular slot at Scotch corner to try out the new camera, and plan out what we're gonna do for filming some live footage of her there in the next coupla weeks.

And somehow I'm *just about* managing to fit all this around a boring full-time day-job too! Damn, but I'm a busy bugger!