MatthewMeyer.net

I’ve been away from this blog and from my portfolio for a long time now… at first due to business, then due to lack of things to write, and finally due to laziness, my greatest foe.

So aside from being very busy with the Japan America Society and illustrations, here’s what I’ve been up to:

We went to Erie, PA to visit Erik and Anna for the holidays. I celebrated my birthday with them, and it was definitely one of the best birthdays in my life (considering that most of my birthdays are spent home alone, bored, until I’m forced to go sing at church for the Christmas Eve service, this isn’t saying much; but it really was a great day). Erik and Anna took me to an indoor heated water park, and on Christmas Eve it wasn’t crowded at all, so there were no lines. There’s something extra fun about water slides and lazy rivers when it’s 30 degree outside. After the water park, we went to Chuck E. Cheese’s, where I was told I set a new age record for birthday parties. The management looked so unhappy and uncomfortable to be singing the happy birthday from Chuckie song to me, but I enjoyed it. I hadn’t been to Chuck E. Cheese’s in years, but let me tell you: it doesn’t get any less fun with age!

Christmas was nice as well. We spent the day playing board games (mostly Carcassonne) and taking naps. We also haven’t had a nice family Christmas like that in a long time, so it was definitely something special. And since I hardly ever get to see Erik and Anna, that was nice too.

We came back to Collingswood after that, and Erik and Anna followed us and stayed here for a while. My Aunt and Uncle from Vermont also visited for New Years weekend. And Frances came! She was able to stay here for 10 days (pretty much her whole winter break).

Frances and I watched a bunch of movies at home and at the theater. I finally got to see King Kong and Memoirs of a Geisha (and unfortunately we also saw Bloodrayne). We also watched the whoel series of Densha Otoko, a Japanese drama based on a true story about an otaku who falls in love with a beautiful lady and draws a huge following with his series of postings on a singles BBS asking for advice. It was such a good show, and I guess I’m extra partial to it being a nerd myself.

Last week we spent most of the time in Philadelphia… and neither of us had done that much walking since we were in Kanazawa. It was great though! I hardly ever get to walk around Philly, so we got to explore the area together. We walked through Chinatown, visited the Body Worlds exhibit at the Franklin Institute (plastinized bodies — go see it if you haven’t had the chance yet), walked around Old City and all the historical areas, visited the Constitution Center and saw a bunch of stuff related to Ben Franklin (it will be his 300th birthday on the 17th). We also went out to dinner with my Japanese coworkers at a sort of belated New Year’s party. We were very busy the whole vacation, but I guess when you don’t get to see each other often you end up trying to make up for lost time.

So what’s the plan for 2006?

Well, I just noticed that WordPress 2.0 recently was released, so I will be upgrading the blog to that relatively soon. Actually, I want to redesign my entire webpage… redo the portfolio page as well as the blog, and organize the whole thing a bit better. Web development is pretty fun for me and I’m not too bad at it (although I could hardly be called anything more than an amateur), so sometimes I get these bursts of desire to build and update. I don’t know when I’ll find the time to do this, but I will.

Of course, I’m still working at the JASGP — now 3 days a week instead of 2. We’re preparing for the big Cherry Blossom Festival this spring, so I have extra work to do, which is good for me as well because I need the extra money to work off my big December purchase: a brand new Wacom Cintiq 21UX digital tablet! Digital illustration is fun, but with the current tablet I have, it seems more like a chore than like creating art… so this will help out a lot with that. And it will speed me up a lot with painting, so hopefully I can start taking on more artwork.

One of my holiday gifts to everyone in my family was a “Chickens of 2006″ calendar made from the chickens in my senior project. It was a big hit, and I’m glad I finally followed the advice of everyone telling me to make a calendar out of them. Unfortunately I only made a few of them for family, so I don’t have any to sell now, and even worse, it’s no longer the Year of the Rooster, so the double-appeal of the chicken calendar is gone. But 2007 will be the Year of the Boar, so I want to make 12 new paintings, this time of pigs, in a similar style as the chickens. That will keep my quite busy, I’m sure, but if I do them all digitally on my new tablet, it won’t take as much time as the chickens did.

I’m meeting up for Japanese conversation practice a little more often now, too. So hopefully I’ll be able to sharpen my speaking and listening skills a little more. This fall, I plan on applying for the JET Programme to teach English in Japan with Frances. That’s still a ways away, though.

Those are pretty much my current plans for 2006… I guess if I have any resolutions, they’re to eat healthier and get more exercise (one of the standard universal resolutions), to play less video games and spend less time doing nothing in front of the computer, and to force myself to keep drawing and painting. My room doesn’t have good ventilation, so it’s hard to paint in here (especially in the winter)… but the new tablet should fix that, and I want to remember to draw sketches when I’m not painting.

And I guess one last resolution is to update this website more often… anything that forces me to be more active so I end up using my time instead of killing it. (You know, it was a lot easier to write in here when I was stuck at the ARC in Ringling with nothing to do…)