Eye pictures!

I finally managed to take some accepable snapshots out of a macro video of my eye, one of which I will trace, making that shape into Vosmerre.
I will hopefully be starting my map on monday! Praise God!

Mapping: Vosmerre Is In my Eye and I Can't Get It Out!!!

As I said in an earlier post, I took up mapping in order to map my fantasy world centered around Vosmerre. But, unfortunately (this is when I explain the strange title) VOSMERRE IS IN MY EYE AND I CAN'T GET IT OUT!!!! [translation] The part of my eye called the iris is what I want to model Vosmerre after, it actually sort of looks like an island; the problem is I can't get a clear picture of it so that I can copy it on my map.
So this map is just for fun and practice. As you can see, it's not by any means finished-but I plan to update you on my blog as I progress on it.

Map-Building

Well, I said in my last post that I am going to build a fantasy world. It's named after the "main" nation in it: Vosmerre.
So I have been doing a lot of thinking and have been having a great time envisioning my world, but I realized I would need to make a map. I thought it would be neat to draw it by hand, but I was afraid it might take weeks to do and then I wouldn't even like the result; so I decided to buy a map making program called Campaign Cartographer. After I build the map in this program I might try to hand draw it too.

Here is a map of an island called Furim I made after watching a bunch of tutorials:

I really like this program and recommend it to anyone interested in that kind of thing.

If you have any ideas that you think might help with my map or world, please put them in the comments below. :-) Thanks!

Hard Goodbyes

Well, again, it's been awhile since the stuff I'm blogging today has happened, but I was pretty busy so I had to wait until today to do it.
 My Uncle James and Aunt Christina and their two daughters are on their way to Papua New Guinea to serve as bible translators for the next four years, after which they get a one year break to visit family, etc.
Here are some pictures of them:

 

So we went to see them off at the airport Sunday, and they are now safely in Australia. Your prayers for them are appreciated!

Building Vosmerre

I am going to try and build a fantasy world and when I think I've built it sufficiently for some stories to live in it, I will try to write some publish-worthy stories about/in it.
I found a world-builder which I think I will use at least to some extent, if you're interested in seeing what I've got ahead of me, click here.
Vosmerre I think will be it's name, but I'm not completely sure yet (I probably won't be until a book about it has been published so that I can't change it any more).
It will be the Medieval-type fantasy with dwarves, fauns, centaurs, people, dragons and other creatures in it. I have been praying that God will guide and help me as I try to put this together in a way that will please and glorify Him.
I think it will have some significant influences from C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, but I also intend to make things very different in my series from any other fantasy.
I intend to blog as I go through this, so expect to hear a lot more about Vosmerre (or whatever it becomes!). If any of you reading this have suggestions that you think will be helpful please let me know; also please pray for guidance and wisdom for me as I embark on this adventure.

Vacation and Stuff

Every year we go on a vacation for me and my Mom in honor of our birthdays. But about a week or two before our vacation we were waiting in line at the Costco gas station and Mom was just commenting on the fact that we hadn't been having much car trouble when a muffled explosion coming from under the hood of our car announced that our radiator had blown up, forcing us to abandon our plans for that evening and get towed home as well as buy a new radiator and install it. Needless to say, we were pretty disappointed when this happened. But I tried to convince myself that God had a good reason for it--somehow. Well, when Grandpa helped Dad fix the car, he also helped us fix the fan that had been malfunctioning and had thus allowed our radiator to get too hot. Now we have a switch in the car that must be turned on when we start the car and turned off before we get out. Here's the awesome part: on our way to the beach (the destination for out trip was Depoe Bay) we had to go through Tigard with a lot of stop and go traffic that would most certainly have blown our radiator as many times as necessary to keep us from going on vacation at all! Get it? If our radiator hadn't blown at the gas station a mere twenty miles from home then it would have blown up while we were in Tigard (about twice as far away from home) and successfully canceled our birthday trip (or at least horribly and disgustingly delayed it)! God is good all the time!

When we got to the hotel we were pretty sick of sitting in the car (at least I was, my knees were killing me!) and were very glad to get out and get into the room. Here is a picture of Judah unpacking his stuff in our room.








On my birthday we went and looked at some of the tourist shops and went to the dock to look at sea lions while they took their neverending beauty sleeps (which, in my opinion, have no positive effect on their appearance), there was a baby sea lion sleeping next to it's mom, he was actually kinda cute.

 One of the lions looked like something had cut into his neck, wonder what it was? Sorry the picture's not rotated the right way, blame blogger for not being photo friendly enough.

I'm pretty sure this one is out of order, but it's a cool picture anyway. :-) Sunsets over the ocean are amazing if they're visible.

 This the birthday cake Mom made for me and Judah and I helped decorate.
Thanks Mom!

If you're ever in the Depoe Bay area and want a good place to find agates then go to Fogarty Creek. Sorry, no directions will be found here, good luck finding it! hahaha!!!!!

 This is a sign beside a book store called 'Roberts Books' and this sign reserves a spot for the owner, I thought it was funny enough to take a picture of.

 I noticed this while I was looking for agates and thought they were pretty interesting. If you use your imagination (if it's anything like mine) the cracks in these rocks can look like a network of huge canyons. Amazing.

There were a lot of amazing splashes we could see from our room, some of them were close to three stories high!

 Judah and I had a lot of fun building forts and putting "star wars guys" on them and knocking them down. I think we had more fun than they did.

 These last two were taken May 18th and I thought I would include them. I'm hoping to sell prints of the top one.

 Over all our trip was very nice, we found lots of agates and got to play lots of games together...Thank God that he provided a way for us to get there by allowing our radiator to blow up! God bless.

Sorry

So some might say I haven't been blogging in a while. Well, I guess I would say that they would be right.
But I'm blogging again! The diet mom and I started a while ago is drawing to a close (finally)!

Yep, we've added sugar back in, and in a couple days chocolate will be added back to our diet (with much ceremony, of course)! Soon we will be able to eat everything we used to, but we'll be trying to limit a few things so that we can try to stay healthy.
And about symptoms...I have had a runny nose for almost two weeks and am beginning to wonder if that is a symptom of cutting out so many things from my diet...hopefully it'll go away soon, it seems to be getting better.
Also my Urticaria hasn't changed at all; I think I would need to have a much more drastic plan of action than a elimination diet in order to get rid of it.
I am looking forward to the diet being over and am planning on never doing it again (unless my family is crazy enough to do it again).
God bless.