Happy (soon to be for me) New Year!! I wish everyone here a great and happy 2024!!!
2023 was a pretty rough year for me due to a lot of stuff happening in my personal life, and there were things I wish I had done and made, but I plan to be and do better in 2024!! I hope we all have an amazing 2024!!
I know we like to make all the jokes about "how's the writing" "Great! I just cleaned my entire apartment and gave the cat a bath!" (and also those are very real moments) but I just spend the last maybe two hours cleaning the tub/shower walls, rearranging bathroom items to more accessible/memorable places for my ADHD brain, threw several things away that needed to be thrown out a year ago, and redid the coloring on my hair and you know what?
I feel like I could actually work on one of my WIPs.
Imma go eat and see if I can get some words into Midnight Madness.
I noticed only yesterday and now I'm making this late post but thank you.
In my art history I have never reacher a 3 digit number of followers.
And because of that I'm doing a giveaway/raffle(?). I will pick a random person out of the reblogers to draw a picture for. (Liking and commenting might boost your chances.)
More on the sketchy side (like the picture above) because I don't have that much time but winner can pick between styles I can do. It doesn't need to look "traditonal" either.
Winner will be picked when I feel like it (up to a week at max).
This blog is a small project to catalogue animation memes that people can search through the tags. Want to animate some OC angst? Go check the story tag. Want to find a meme for just a test animation? Look at the loop tag! if your looking for a mix of both we do multiple tags if they apply!
When we post a meme we will link the original for easy access with the tags below [+ some emotion ones like sad or happy ect], in the case the same meme has altered or remixed audio we'll repost the original original when making it.
If you have a meme you want on here just use the ask box!
The Current tags
#Story - Animation memes that are best to tell your OCs story, notable examples of a Story animation meme are Sirfluff's Epoch meme or Opaline's Darkside meme
#Action - Fight scenes! Memes like Useless, False Alarm or ones like Screaming.
#Character - Animation memes that are not looping or really story but more of on their character, like Peppermint or Everybody Loves Me.
#Loop - Animation memes that are mainly looping, they have been mainly used as animation tests. Memes like Opinions.
#Celebratory - Someone you know had a birthday or you reached a sub goal YIPPPEEEE🎉🎉🎉
I think the short version of this post is just this: the more I get to know this dog the more I grow to love her. There are things we have struggled with of course, but as she slowly matures and her personality develops, those are becoming fewer and fewer, meanwhile the great, amazing things become more and more.
Overall I think Kaija is on the chill side as far as Aussies go, tho I should say that my sample size is basically... one. For a dog who *loves* to do stuff, at this point she's pretty willing to accept off days, although if there's too many in a row then she might get whiny about it. She's still very funny and very soft (her winter coat is coming in and it's nearly as soft now as when she was a puppy, apparently the undercoat is where the softness comes from), and she still struggles to remain connected to the ground (well I guess it's not much of a struggle in that she just... doesn't). She isn't a barky dog at all - on occasion she might bark if I get her extra amped up in play + I think there's been maybe three times when she's barked at the neighbours' dogs going crazy, but that's pretty much it. Instead she expresses her opinions through whining and through other vocalisations that I don't even have a word for.
Kaija is incredibly easy to work with. She forgives my handling mistakes and powers through even if I'm being annoyingly unclear in what I want from her. I'm a very green handler so it helps immensely that she is so resilient and optimistic. Plus, Kaija is easy to motivate, she loves food and will work for kibble if the environment isn't too difficult, and she's had pretty decent toy skills almost from the start. But the best thing is seeing how much she enjoys our training itself. Yes, the rewards are important to her and I'm more than happy to use them liberally, but you can't miss how she lights up when I bring out our training equipment. I think she loves the puzzle of it and getting it right, as well as simply the chance to work together with me.
We'll be ending this year with one last rally trial on the 18th. I'm really hoping for two more >90% scores - we already have two from our previous trial and four is the max before you have to move on to the next class. I think it would be nice to have all four qualifying scores and start getting ready for RO-2 in the spring. That being said, our biggest struggle is still sustaining focus and engagement through the whole course and this will be a brand new indoor venue for us... So we'll see how it goes.
For the first year-ish that I had Kaija, I wasn't sure whether this breed was right for me or whether we were the best fit. I had the puppy blues for a few months and then for a long time I just had this vague feeling that we weren't completely clicking, like something just wasn't fitting quite right. I remember how in the beginning I was so impressed with her spark and willingness to work with me, but I also felt a bit bad because I knew that someone more experienced could do so much more with her. But we're figuring it out together and I'm slowly learning how to be a better teacher to her. Besides, although I do believe she enjoys the work, she isn't obsessive about and it's only one part of what makes a happy Kaija. So maybe a filthy casual owner such as myself is just the sweet spot for her. I'm still not convinced that I'll have more Aussies in the future (I have to say tho, it's getting dangerously difficult to remember exactly why I was so sure I shouldn't), but holy shit is this dog everything to me.
I was panicking because I don't have the money to cover my payments for top surgery and fucking insurance came through and covered all but $350, holy shit. I've been dealt so fucking many blows over the past few months, all I could do when I got the news was start crying. I still don't know whether insurance is going to cover the two ER visits and the emergency surgery from the massive Hematoma, but holy shit having all but $350 removed from my portion of the bill helps so goddamn much. I've shut down the Gofundme and removed the link from my initial post - here's to hoping insurance makes the same decisions with the ER visits as they did with the initial surgery. I really fucking needed this.