Life is very good: Christmas is coming, no school, my term papers have been done for weeks, and I have a great job that is so far going very well.  Live is just EXCELLENT.

My art has been slumbering for months now, but it has finally woken up for Christmas.  I previously completed the portrait of Jeremy Irons for a friend's birthday, and it seemed to be a success; well, there's another friend whose birthday was recent, and she happens to like Hugh Jackman.  Therefore, I'm drawing a portrait of him on a normal sheet of 8.5x11" paper, to be completed on Christmas Eve or morning, I'm not sure which yet   Anyway, that's fun: I love Hugh Jackman's face, it's just really awesome to draw.  Plus, he's a great actor, and I just recently saw the Prestige, which blew me away

Many many many distractions of late have kept me from drawing anything these days, other than the occasional awful comic for the school newspaper.

The biggest is of course the new graphics card.  I ordered a NVidia GeForce 9800GT 256-bit 1GB GDDR3 card on Newegg and slotted the monster in as soon as it arrived.  A few minutes later, and I was playing every single game I have on the highest settings with no problems whatsoever.  Crysis was just gorgeous; I got Maximum Edition so I could play the multiplayer as well.  Just beautiful.  And Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, and Far Cry 2 looked amazing too.  So basically I've been having fun shooting North Koreans, aliens, and trees for the last month.

I have also discovered the wonders of Frank Sinatra, and have been listening to him quite a bit these days.  Other distractions include school - now over for the year - and work, which has started to pick up; it's going very nicely and I'm making pretty good money.  And it's actually quite fun, even if I'm only cleaning off tables and scraping food off of dishes   I also have a nice little State ID card, so I can buy M-rated games (finally) myself - just a few days ago I bought Halo 2 just for the hell of it   I also got a new MP3 player - 16GB with photo and video playback as well.  I love it.

Anyway, that's all.  Drawing to recommence when school starts, as I have another Independent Study class 3rd quarter.  Cheerio.