The Botched Photoshoot and the Gallery of "Ugly Sits"...

Happy Leap Day!! I hope you remembered to wear your blue and yellow :) I just bought some brand new index cards and thought it would be fun to scribble a story.

It was a lazy weekend morning, and Christmastime was near. I had recently decorated my place for the holidays with a small tree, some lights, and even fake snow on some of the furniture..

 I had my favorite coffee cup...

 And was ready for some quality spacing-out time in front of the TV.

 

I barely took my very first sip of coffee...

 When Chaos appeared on the TV stand.

He was perched on the soft pile of fake snow, beaming at me angelically.

 "It's a Christmas miracle!" I exclaimed, overwhelmed by this uncharacteristic display of cuteness.

 

 

 Chaos responded with a wave of adorableness, the levels of which have never been matched to this day.

 Just believe me, it was ridiculous...

 

I was pretty new to this business of cat-caretaking and it felt like we were sharing a genuine moment.

 Naturally I wanted to snap a photo for Chris:

 

 But when I returned with my camera...

 I found nothing but a cat imprint in the snow.

 I was deeply disappointed.

 

 Chaos had relocated himself to the shag carpet and had assumed his typical sitting posture (which gives him the appearance of a dumpling with back problems).

 

At that moment, I resolved to only collect photos of him demonstrating his poor posture (or "ugly sits" as Carrie and I call them).

So I'm sharing a small sampling of photos I've taken of Chaos. Please enjoy the Gallery of Ugly-Sits:

 the lotus position?

 urrgh!

 Typical couch potato-ing

EDIT: Carrie reminded me to inform the general public that the bald, pink patch on his belly is his one of his bare, hairless, prominently nippled moobs. Chaos. What a creature of grace and beauty.

Do any of your dogs or cats have posture as poor as this?? And more importantly do any of you have documentation of your dogs or cats doing 'ugly sits' of their own?

The Drawn by Chance Challenge! (and a recap of my sickday)

A few of you have inquired about the drawing challenge that the talented Mr. Le Tang and I have started recently. I apologize for how disorganized I've been. This thing is still in its infancy and we're still trying to figure out the best way to run it. First of all, this is a weekly challenge that is open to absolutely anyone who wants to participate. Its original intent was to encourage some of us in the DW story department to work out our storytelling muscles since the awesome bi-weekly drawing challenges ended some time ago. We'd love to see any sort of entries (character designs, illustration, animation, etc.).

Each week, we choose our prompts at random by drawing words from cups. We have one cup of adjectives, a cup of nouns, and a recently added cup of verbs. We select two words...one of these words will always be an adjective, and we will alternate between nouns and verbs for the other.

Tomorrow's challenge is Obsessive Pokemon, for those of you who still want to participate. We're still debating whether or not to start a separate blog for what we are now calling the Drawn by Chance Challenge, but for now, I will be posting entries to my blog (so let me know if you've posted anything up!)

 
Sorry for not getting this up sooner. Yesterday I was home sick with a fever and most of my time was spent like this:

Some of it was spent like this:

 And some of it was spent witnessing this:

HARRGHARRBBLEWRRFALFFF!!

Chaos needs to learn to chew his food.

The Great Kumquat Disaster

The following is the unfortunate tale of an infamous day in Dong family history.

The year was nineteen ninety something. It was a sunny, summer afternoon and my younger brother Jeremy, little cousin Beth and I were hanging about my grandmother's backyard looking for ways to kill time while our parents and older cousins discussed various dull, grown-up topics inside the house.

In one corner of the yard stood a sizable, decades-old kumquat tree that bore hundreds of yellowy-orange fruit.

In an effort to alleviate our boredom, we decided to hold a contest to see who could throw a kumquat the highest.




In his effort to generate the force needed to throw the kumquat highest, Jeremy compromised his aim...




We watched, wide-eyed, as he accidentally hurled a kumquat right over the wall and into a neighbor's yard.



bonk*

After watching the kumquat ricochet off of an air conditioning unit and land with a soft plop in the neighbor's yard, my brother came up with a way to make the game more interesting.



I bet you I can throw a kumquat into that vent thingy...


And that was when things spiraled out of control...



Initially our goal was to try and get a single kumquat through the grates of the AC unit but after many failed attempts, the three of us became consumed with an inexplicable desire to pelt the entire yard with kumquats.



AHAHAHAHAA!

MORE KUMQUATS!


Sonic

BOOM!!

Then, Bethany peeked over another wall and discovered another neighbor's yard.

Look guys! This person's yard has firewood!!

...But not enough KUMQUATS!!


KUMQUAAAAATS!!!!


I can't quite explain what motivated us to do what we did. We threw kumquat after kumquat as though possessed. After at least one full hour of this, we managed to blanket all three of my grandma's next door neighbors' backyards with fruit. Initially, we somehow felt accomplished and we celebrated our victory...


After a few minutes, the sense of jubilation subsided and was replaced by horrifying realization...







What have we

DOOOOOOONE?!?

As the oldest, I felt obligated to formulate a plan. Unfortunately what I came up with didn't make much sense...

Guys...


We have to hide this tree...


It was then one of the next door neighbors emerged from her house and strolled into her once pristine backyard.

Obviously she saw what we had done almost immediately.

And was not amused.




I'm going to tell your Grandma!!

We ran for it, agreeing to never speak of the incident ever again...


A few days later my Dad got a rather baffling phone call from my understandably pissed off grandmother.

They did WHAT?!?!