Stolen from Jessi - thanks girl!

      

1. Have you ever cried during a tattoo? Definitely. My first tattoo was absolutely awful, I had never experienced pain like that before and I was in tears most of the time!
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I slept from about 7:15am to 11:40am, and that was the only sleep I got last night. After I woke up, we went downtown to Jinx Proof to show them the drawing from the artist out in California. The price the guy at the counter gave me for the tattoo was about $400-450 and something like 4-5 hours, but because it’s a color piece he had me set up a consultation with the artist so she can give me a more firm quote. My appointment is on July 19th at 12:30pm - I’ll work about 8-12, head over to Georgetown for the consultation and lunch, and then go back to Gallaudet and work from 2-6. It’s nice having a flexible schedule like that! Unfortunately I’ve only got about $350 in my tattoo fund at the moment, so I’ll be doing a bit more PayPerPost to try to make up the difference.

After we were finished at Jinx Proof, we did a little shopping both along M Street and in the mall there. We tried to go to Harmony Cafe for lunch because they had gotten great reviews, but for some reason they were opening late and we ended up at City Lights of China instead. We poked around in the Leather Rack, Ginza, and Lambda Rising, and got ice cream at Larry’s Homemade.

On the way home we stopped at sskipstress’s house and she kindly loaned me her PS2! It is a short-term loan; the offers I have been getting through Craigslist have been outrageous so I’ll probably just get one locally. When we got home I immediately hooked up the machine and we played some cooperative Guitar Hero 2 for a while.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of a deafness-related tattoo for a while now. Of course the only thing I can really come up with is the ILY handshape - anything else seems like it would be too complicated, although I did know a girl with a finely detailed tattoo of the sign for interpret.

The design I have been working on is pretty basic. I drew up a basic premise and went over it in permanent marker; then I tried to make a color version on the computer but it didn’t come out very well. The blue and green (and maybe purple) should fade out around the edge of the picture, as in the bottom of this space tattoo. The rays should look like crepuscular rays, as seen on this tattoo (but not in green). The style of the heart itself will depend on how the ILY over it comes out, but I would like for it to be kind of 3-D and shaded, a bit like this one.

I am thinking to place this on my upper right arm, up high where it will only peek out from under cap sleeves, for example. And yet I want it to be big enough to be crisp, so the height should be at least the width of my hand, I think. I have no idea how much this would cost or where to go, though I will be stopping by Marlowe Ink tomorrow after work to see how much it would cost to get one of my paw prints fixed up, so I might ask them how much they would charge for that kind of thing. Obviously I’d have to get someone to draw it up proper, though presumably tattoo artists do that all the time, right?

This is all just an idea, the tattoo itself could be months or even years away, or it could never happen. But that’s what’s been knocking around in my head, so I just wanted to get my thoughts down.

Today we docked in Hamilton, the capital of Bermuda. We arrived about an hour later than scheduled, but we didn’t have any morning plans so we didn’t mind. When we got through customs I called the dive shop on a pay phone, but they said the trip would probably be canceled due to lack of enrollment. She said to call back in an hour, and so we wandered around shops near the passenger terminal. When I called back she confirmed it was canceled, but said that they already had the minimum signed up for tomorrow, so we switched to tomorrow’s dive.

Next we took a ¾ mile walk to find a geocache, which was not actually easy to find. On the walk back we stopped in the gift shop of the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute, but we didn’t take the tour. We also went into a grocery store to see if they had anything we couldn’t get in the U.S., but there wasn’t anything interesting. We also went into Tattoo Pirates, who we’d seen ads for around the terminal. I was seriously considering getting a tattoo as a souvenir of Bermuda, but the guy mocked my idea of a hibiscus (yes, they’re cliche, but I’d just seen some walking from the geocache) and A said he was adjusting himself a bit much (ew), so I may not go back after all. I couldn’t get anything before I go scuba diving anyway, so that was how I begged off from him.

We did a bit more shopping, and stopped into an Internet cafe for a few minutes. Then we came back toward the terminal, and A wanted to go into a perfume shop. I went too, and ended up buying a cute purse and a wallet that’s much more practical than the Hello Kitty one I’ve been using for a couple of years. Next we came back on the ship for a very late lunch, and I turned a blind eye to the veggie burger being cooked on the same grill as the meat and handled with the same tongs. I am a strict vegetarian, but some battles just aren’t worth fighting…but I won’t be getting a veggie burger again.

• Today I am down to 161 pounds. I started 2006 at 187.5 pounds. That’s progress, but I still have a while to go.
• I now know three people who have the Sidekick 3. I am not one of them, and I only ever see one in person but he doesn’t usually have his with him then. I don’t think I’ll be wanting one anytime soon.
• I decided to put away my iPod until the new battery and/or the AC adapter arrive. I was going to try updating the firmware because that sometimes helps with battery life, but I didn’t remember that you have to plug it into the wall to complete the firmware update. So it’s a brick till I get the AC adapter, I guess…argh!
• It is so frustrating not to pick at my new tattoo. I want to poke it and move it around and play with it. I think if I got another design on me I would want an ILY handshape.
• I decided to revamp the way skins are presented on my site. Instead of having a skin listing in the sidebar, I now have a skin selection page complete with screenshots. I also put up a single AdBrite ad; so far I have earned 53 cents from it but that’s just from network ads - I don’t think anybody will actually buy an ad on my site. But hey, 53 cents is more than I ever got from AdSense. I don’t like advertising in general, so I may get rid of it eventually, but we’ll see.
• My car was reluctant to start Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, so I took it in last night. It had also been balky about changing gears (it’s an automatic) but that apparently isn’t the transmission or anything else - they said it was just running the A/C that changes the load on the engine. They said the starter might be going bad but it would have been $350 so I said I would wait, and the guy admitted that was actually fine. Turns out I was overdue for my inspection (oops) and in order to pass I needed two new tires. Tires plus inspection plus oil change (that was overdue too) totaled about $215, not bad.

This weekend I biked 19 miles around Manhattan, got my second paw print at Fine Line Tattoo, did not get to meet Alan Cumming, had a treat from Coldstone Creamery because I’d biked so damn hard, and walked two miles from the tattoo shop to my friend’s house. Not in that order, of course, although the biking did come before the tattooing. I was pleased with how little the tattoo hurt, probably because the artist was very nice and kept me chatting the whole time. When I got home, my iPod had finally arrived, albeit with a Firewire cable instead of a USB cable like it was supposed to have. Fortunately Levi, who lives near me, has a spare cable; his is for an iPod mini but this website seems to indicate that a mini cable will be compatible with a 3G iPod; we’ll see…meanwhile I do have a Firewire port at work so the iPod is charging. If the cable Levi has isn’t compatible I will probably just pick up a Firewire PCMCIA card on eBay.

I got my tattoo for Wu today. I ended up going to Fatty’s Custom Tattooz in Dupont Circle, where I was quoted a price of $200 and told the wait was about an hour. That seemed like an awful lot of money, but I remembered the advice of those who told me “quality work costs more” and I handed over my card. The entire shop was really warm - it was at least 75° out, and the air conditioning obviously hadn’t been turned on yet from winter - so I went downstairs to Starbucks and got us cold drinks. I had been nervous as we neared the shop, I was nervous as I searched for parking, I was nervous walking back to the shop…I was definitely scared, and sitting around for an hour just got me more worked up! I talked with crayon on my Sidekick; she has a number of tattoos and told me that she’s been scared before every one.
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I think I’m going to get another tattoo. I got my current one (SFW, NSFW) in December 1999 and I screamed bloody murder the whole time, so I never got it touched up. I have been considering another tattoo for a while now, but I promised I would get the original touched up before getting anything additional. I just called Dragon Moon to see if my original artist could do the touch up, but they require $100 cash before they will even make an appointment. (Because I live more than an hour away, they’d accept a $100 money order in the mail.) Also, the black they use is different now, so she would probably have to go over the whole thing to make it look even.

So I think I’m going to get my other tattoo first, because that will be small and will help prepare me for the larger project of my original tattoo getting touched up. I had originally wanted a Hello Kitty tattoo, but I discarded that idea a little while ago. Now, I know what I’m getting: a memorial tattoo for Wu. I’ve been reading an “Over the Rainbow” [Bridge] group at Catster, and I’ve been thinking about a memorial for her. Someone suggested a scrapbook, but I realized…I could really go for a tattoo. It would be like keeping her with me always - and probably about the same price as any of the cremation jewelry I looked at.

I’m planning to get a paw print, but I want a realistic one rather than a stylized silhouette, probably not more than an inch square. I’m going to get it on the outside of my thigh, up close to my hip. As my other cats cross the Rainbow Bridge, I will want to get a new paw for each of them, until there is a trail of them down my thigh. A couple of people have suggested an initial in each, or a name with them, but I don’t think I’m going to do that - I want to memorialize in the abstract. I know it’s a memorial tattoo, but nobody else has to.

I have to decide where to go. Dragon Moon is too far away, so it should be somewhere in the DC area. There are apparently a couple of places in Fairfax, and of course there are several in the city itself. Jinx Proof is reportedly very clean and reasonably good, but everyone agrees they are expensive and some people say the artists have poor “bedside” manners. Fatty’s Custom Tattooz is also supposed to be good but pricey, but I don’t think I want to tell people “Fatty’s” when they ask where I got the ink. There’s also Tattoo Paradise, and I’m curious about AX Tattoo because she’s on the LiveJournal friends lists of both preppyperv and redwaterlilly, and I could swear I recognize her. So I have to figure out where to go, and I should probably visit a few places. But I’m pretty damn sure I want this tattoo.