For all you young and young-at-heart out there, this week is National Teen Driver Safety Week. Ya'll may think seatbelts are uncomfortable, or make you look "un-cool" while you're driving or riding, but they do save lives. And as far as speed, guys, they make speed limits for a reason...ya know?

and I have both lost friends and family (respectively), within the last sevreal days, and in both instances, they could possibly have been spared if they'd been wearing seatbelts.

Today we buried my husband's cousin's son, Tyler. [link] [link]
Today lost a dear friend. [link]

Please, if you consider yourself old enough to enjoy the priviledge of driving, you're old enough to take responsibility for your own safety as well as the saftey of others.

Buckle Up and Drive Carefully!!!!

**Warning I'm about to blow off some steam...**

First I'd like to say that I truly, truly appreciate the efforts of artists like as well as others for creating tutorials for under-skilled artists like myself to learn from. They post their hard work up as a guide for us to learn things like expressions, body language, etc. I have used their references in a lot of my work (whether I did them justice or not).

However, I am getting really, really tired of some folks on here "borrowing" (read as stealing) other artists work and simply, idk, turning it into a black and white picture, coloring it in, etc. and not giving credit to the original artists! For example, lot of folks put lineart up, and I'm sure they are quite happy when someone takes the time to color it in, but don't go throwing something up here on dA and say "I colored this, I hope you like it." without even alluding to who the orginal artist was. Give credit where it is due people!

Marta, Mary Dreams, Lberghol, Mudblood428 (just to name a few)'s work has been victimized quite a bit and it breaks my heart because I know that they find it discouraging.

Think about it people, if you're going to pour your heart and soul into something, spend hours on it trying to hone in your artistic skills, and then 6 months later someone rips off your work, wouldn't that piss you off???

If I stepped on some toes here, well, then they needed stepping on!
No apologies today folks!

I'd unless I misread my information above, it looks like I've gone from only having about 2 months of a subscription left to five. I don't have any notes or messages regarding how I attained three additional months, or who my benefactor is, so let me just say a thank you to that kind soul. It is greatly appreciated!

So here we are less than a month from the first day of spring and we finally have some snow! Whee!

No baby-sitting kids came today since schools were out (that means they're parents had off too), even the hubs stayed home. We fixed biscuits and country ham for breakfast (the kids could barely eat, they were so excited). And even though it took nearly fifteen minutes to get everyone dressed, we finally made it outside.

And the darnedest thing, somehow the door to the van was left open during the night, so it snowed inside the van! Wtf??? So we had to turn the heater on to start melting the snow.

After ten minutes we almost had a mutiny, the hubs went to his folk's side of the farm to borrow his dad's four-wheeler and the girls started crying "daddy left, where did daddy go? I wanna go with daddy! I'm cold! I wanna go inside" Finally he came back and all of a sudden they weren't cold and crying anymore. Amazing. Lol!
Then, using a little red-neck enginuity, the plastic top of the sandbox became a sled pulled by a four-wheel. Lol! Kris wouldn't have anything to do with it, but Skylar had a blast. I even hopped on the four-wheeler with the hubs and Krissy to pull Skylar along (kids, don't try this at home).

Got some cute pics of the kids in the snow, I'll have to post them later.
We're probably go back out after Krissy gets up from her nap. For that matter, I think now that my belly's full and the hubs has the fire going, a nap doesn't sound like a bad idea.

Later ya'll.

Lastnight the weather channel was predicting up to three inches of snow here for today. I went to the trouble of lugging out the kid's snow boots, quilted overalls, jackets, etc., so that I wouldn't have to hunt them down today. And guess what, during the night the snow swept south of us! Argh!! So all we have today is wind gusts up to 20 mph and two disappointed kids with a bad case of cabin fever. We haven't had a decent snow here since the year Skylar as conceived, winter of 2003 (ever notice how autumn baby-booms corelate to snowfall of the previous winter?? Lol!).

So for those of you who live in parts that actually got significant snowfall and are grumbling about digging out your sidewalks and vehicles, think about that bored stay-at-home mom in Virginia with two kids who are bouncing off the walls and are dying to build their first snowman.