The X-Mas Haul

These last few weeks came and went with some struggle. The big news was that a few hours before my brothers were due to leave for Korea for a few days, Kim Jong Il's death was announced. After a lot of discussion and preparations, the bros boarded the flight anyway and while I knew everything was going to be fine, I still was a jittery mess the next day and obsessively checked the news every few hours. Anyway, they came home and aside from one brother catching a cold, all was well. Phew. Other than that, spent the holidays working on some light freelance, doodling naked men, planning my next storyboard, and obsessing over turkey.

After years of eating dry turkey, I've been curious about how actual delicious, moist turkey tastes like so I accepted a challenge from my mother to cook a turkey for Christmas. After some bickering, teasing, and squawks of, "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!" from the more turkey experienced members of my family, I served Alton Brown's roast turkey and gravy with much success. The turkey was moist and flavorful and while the gravy was unexpectedly salty, I was well praised. Of course this probably means I have to make the turkey for Thanksgiving forever now but hey, I've done it once, I probably can do it again. I'm also wondering how turkey would taste in a more Korean style brine with soy sauce, sesame seed oil, garlic and green onion... but I don't think I've mastered the turkey enough to even try something like this.

As for the Christmas haul, I got:
Cash
2 cowls from Forever 21 (very soft~)
A cropped sweater that looks like it came directly from the 80's! The fashions kids wear these days!
Smurfs Holiday DVD XD
Ponyo on DVD (yay!)
Laputa on DVD (more yay!)
Some expensive face cream from Greenland. I haven't tried it yet but I will soon.
2 pairs of really fun socks (I love goofy socks)
OMG Pwnies shirt!
Storyboard Pro (bought this for myself)

I finally forked over money during the Boxing Day sale to buy Storyboard Pro and while it was indeed on sale, it still was fairly pricey. But I'm really sick of storyboarding in Flash, I hate the drawing tools, the fact that it can't export a movie with audio without a lot of struggling, and how I have struggle with After Effects to make a presentable file that can be uploaded. There's also no good way of printing out the images into a flat book portfolio and SB Pro can do all of that. I'm still learning how to use it but thankfully, there are free video tutorials online that I'm watching done by the lovely and wonderful Sherm Cohen. My goal is to understand how to use the program by the end of this year and be able to do my next board on it. *FIST PUMP*

( Here I talk about coming out of the non-religious closet. )