It’s August already! Damn, where does the time go? Summer’s almost over…Heck, 2018 is more than half-gone! And the day is nearly done, which means it’s time to blog. So what should I blog about? Been a busy day here at the Smomestead, but I am hobbit-like in many of my habits, and for me, ‘busy’ does not mean ‘exciting’. It means I did some housework, played some video games, went to lunch with my sister and my father….

Side bar here: I think we inadvertently crashed a party. The front room was…you know, not FULL, but full enough that we didn’t want to be crowded, and these other people were going into the side room, so WE went into the side room, and it wasn’t until we were all at the table and enjoying our meals that I noticed there was a couple banquet tables set up and about 80% of the diners appeared to know each other by name. But no one confronted us. Maybe it was a family reunion and everyone was too embarrassed to admit they didn’t recognize all the extended family. Or maybe everyone was in awe of The Beard and just naturally assumed anyone who rocked a beard like that could also summon fireballs on command.

Anyway, we went from lunch to do the weekly grocery shopping, during which interlude, I was compelled to purchase some hair dye that promises me a Lusty Lavender adventure, and then we went home, winding down from the pure adrenaline of our day with a little painting. Behold!

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Much love to The Art Sherpa for her Purple Pixie tutorial, which gave me the background, and much love to my friend K., who sent me the pic of the totally adorable fuzzy little moth that gave me the inspiration for the moth-pixies.

And of course, it’s Friday night, so I uploaded the latest chapter of my FNAF fanfiction, Everything Is All Right, Part IV: New Faces, Old Bones! If you are reading along on that adventure, head on over to fanfiction.net or archiveofourown.org and check it out. If you’re still undecided…well, it’s unlikely that anything I can say at this late stage in the game is going to change your mind, but hey, if you want to read the chapter but you happen to be at the grocery store and just need a taste to hold you over until you can read the rest, then enjoy this snippet! Meanwhile, I will be setting off on a Lusty Lavender adventure!

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Today, a Monday, came at six o’clock as all days did, but there was no last cut across his consciousness, severing him from the night’s protocols and directing him to the stage to shut down until it was time for the restaurant to open. He could do anything he wanted, provided his aspirations extended no further than the pizzeria. And they didn’t, really. They had once. Back at Mulholland, the Purple Man had brought someone in to paint up the walls in Kiddie Cove and she’d done a right job of it, painting a beach with the ocean and palm trees and whales and the like, and there on the painted sand, way in the corner behind Foxy’s fake ship where no one could see it but him and Foxanne, she’d put in a buggish sort of creature tucked up in a pop can. Chica said it was a real thing, called it a hermit crab. Said they lived in shells and the like, and pop cans too, and when they outgrew their old homes, they found a new one and moved in.

It had struck a chord with Foxy at the time. Mulholland had been much bigger than the place on High Street, where he could remember feeling fierce-squeezed from time to time, performing in a closet with a curtain drawn across and playing the Game in a building that could have fit in this one’s dining room—kitchen, shitters and all. Mulholland had seemed so gloriously spacious at first, room for all, even when those ruddy Others moved in, but by the time the painter had hidden her little secret crab in the back of Foxy’s stage, he had already begun to feel the pinch and an itch to roam. Circle Drive, which he knew to be smaller in numbers, seemed so much bigger without the Others, but after a few years, it had grown small around him. And after that, back to the vault in the basement of the Glass House that had once been home, his first home…that he had hoped would be his last. That shell had been too small even before he slipped it on, as welcome as it had been in its own bleak way.

Perhaps its confinement had killed the crabby bits of him, crushed it dead within Foxy’s shell, because when he’d been moved here, to this proper palace of a pizzeria on the edge of the great wide world, he’d felt…nothing. No itch to wander further than the quarry where they dumped their kills, no desire to see what lay beyond these red flats or those distant blue mountains. No hope that he would ever see another Grand Opening and no anticipation of disappointment if he should be proved wrong. What rare whims of wanderlust that passed over him were adequately answered merely by a turn through the arcade, or in extreme cases, a few minutes on the loading dock to look at the stars. He had watched the sun rise on Friday, his first in the whole of his life, and he hadn’t even bothered to save a stillshot for his mental memory book. It was just the sun, after all. There was better light in the building now and he couldn’t even feel the warmth.