Things have been...good!  I'm starting to find my pace, I think.  The new and old are starting to integrate together.  It's a nice feeling.

The Mentor Tournament (for ALTTPR) is in full swing now.  I don't think I'll be able to swing the type of win-loss record that I did last year (it was crazy, and probably just lucky, at one point my mentees were 8-1, that's an 88% win rate...), but I'm going to try my best to help out those who are seeking guidance, best I can.  At the very least, I know there are things that only I really teach.  I'm...not really sure why I'm the only one, but whatever.

The other day was super satisfying as I spent a long time working on this month's pixel drawing, which has now become my new avatar -- the nicest one yet, too.  The past 8 months or so have all been traced, which of course is not the =worst= thing, I still get practice on working with pixels in general, antialiasing, coloring, selective outlines, etc.  There was one piece I worked with in particular where the colors were fascinating, really interesting to try and translate them into a limited palette, and I didn't just copy/paste/quantize the colors from the source image either.

But I did get called out on it at one point, started to feel a little iffy about it myself, made those albums into free downloads only, and this month I used a reference but took it in my own style and didn't do any tracing or anything.  Honestly expected the result to be much more lackluster, but somehow it ended up better than most of the actual traced drawings...go figure.  Anyways, tracing was a nice and easy fallback that honestly mostly just saved me creative "effort" and energy and provided with me with a nice and easy way to take care of my monthly commitment without thinking too hard, but I guess this works, too.

Been trying to take care of other things in the meantime, too.  Took care of the laundry today, and mailed out some letters as well.  There is minor trouble going on in chickie-land, as usual -- some mild problems with eggs (calcium deficiency, perhaps), but also another unwelcome food thief, which surprised us at first because we sealed up the outsides of the coop, but we realized that it's been coming through the opening in between the "duplex" structure.  That's something that probably won't be =too= hard to fix up, just need some sort of "tunnel" that I can use as a mini skybridge.  Just another thing to take care of at some point, I guess.  Have some gift shopping to do as well, at some point...

More importantly, I'm finally getting back at working on Rhythm Quest.  Had some nice, I mean =nice= work time on it today, for the first time in a while.  I pretty much skipped working on it all of last month, so it's nice to finally be back at it.  Not only did I do some charting work, but implemented some fixes here and there, and even improved some functionality (camera smoothing) and tweaked some UI flows.  Hopefully I can keep it up...

My happiness is here, too.  I donno how much to really describe or talk about it, but there have been some things that I think have made a big difference for me.  I can really feel them.  All that stuff about self-confidence and self-forgiveness and all that.  I always kinda knew that I was valuable, admired, lovable, all that stuff.  But I think I had trouble "believing" it.  I asked myself a few weeks ago what it would be like to believe in it and at the time I like...didn't really know, it felt like I couldn't really imagine it.  But I think I'm beginning to.