Hi, my name is Patty and I love art. I was known as "keirajo" over on Fur Affinity, but I have chosen to leave that site permanently as of April 30, 2015. About my username..."Keira-Jo" was an Echidna female I created for a Sonic the Hedgehog fan club back in 1996. When the fan club disbanded I used her in fan-fiction I wrote. She's been a big part of my life for a very long time, so I often use her name or image as my avatar when I am online anywhere.

Hello everyone! It's been quite some time since a longer journal (a weekend update journal). 2019 has been something of a strange, strange year so far. The past 10 days have had a number of changes--I almost feel like the larva in our butterfly cage at work right now, things are changing constantly it's been a bit hard to keep up. From going to get bloodwork at a new lab facility (so nerve-wracking!) to the closing of my local comic shop (I knew it was coming, I merely didn't know when) to preparing for this year's Summer Reading Program at work........it feels like I haven't had much time to sit and breathe, much less "chat" with anyone via e-mails or notes or draw or anything like that! @_@

Was the year I turn 45 meant to be this weird and difficult???

So, how are you all doing? How's your weather been? It's been wacky here in my area of Illinois. We went from 40's to 80's within a week or so. The Mississippi River flooded pretty bad this year, practically record-breaking........and we've barely had a chance to dry out with a fairly constant round of rain the past two weeks. Last night I sat with my elderly neighbor and his dog and we watched a crazy storm come in. He has a weather radio, so we were listening to it with the creeping-across-Iowa updates of the storm system, until we got rain starting around 10:30 p.m.--but we saw lightning in the northwest clouds for like nearly 90 minutes before we got any of it. There was no thunder that we could hear until it was about 20 minutes out from us. But it sounds like some areas got hit really hard with up to 80mph winds and golf-ball-size hail!!! We merely got heavy rain, some winds (maybe 30-40mph) and thunder/lightning when it finally got to us. I was checking the map-in-motion on my phone and I could tell the storm system was breaking up as it swept across Iowa, so I knew we wouldn't have it so bad by the time it reached us, but the weather radio was reporting some really bad weather across Iowa as the storm came towards us. I took a couple videos of the lightning on my phone, too.

My "Futurama" game on my iPhone became glitched the day after it was discontinued (from the shops and from updates/in-app purchases) and it made me sad, because I've been playing for like.......uh, five years I think? I know I had it on my old phone and I think I've had this current phone for three years now. But one of my co-workers had it on his phone (which was an Android), so I could only think that it had to be an iPhone glitch. The glitch finally corrected itself yesterday and I'm able to play it again. Oh, and then this morning I hear that internet star pet, Grumpy Cat, has died. Like I said, an odd and strange week.

I mean, last week I go in to my comic shop and find out it's closing for definite now. There are...........unpleasant words and feelings I have over this, but I don't feel like going into it. But one thing that had worried me was that I was told "nothing new was coming in"--and there were a couple special order items I had pre-paid on and still had not gotten. The manager texted me the other day to say she had finally acquired those items and I went to pick them up, today. There's a part of me that knew the closing was coming, given a number of not-quite-said-out-loud-words since last fall, so I was trying not to get excited about things anymore. And for those who don't know, I've been collecting comics like since I was ten-years-old............starting with a handful of "Justice League of America" comics I found at a yard sale when I was little. So, "Justice League" and [peripherally] DC Comics have been a been focus of my comic book collecting career. Even when I lost my first long-term comic shop, I was still able to get "Justice League" and some other DC stuff at local bookshops, like Borders and Waldenbooks......until I came to this particular comic shop that will soon be closing. I've gotten many, many other comics, too..........but "Justice League" has been a big focus of this collecting career of mine. So.............when DC did "Rebirth" as their reboot a time of some sort ago I have to say--I've been slowly losing interest in what DC's doing. The fact that they have to do hard reboots every couple of years and then sometimes soft reboots inbetween their hard reboots.........it's hard to be a long-time fan of any comic anymore.

The word "reboot" is becoming reviled by many comic book collectors, to tell the truth. And companies use the excuse that "new readers don't want to start in the middle" of a numbered series, so to "get new readers" they feel they have to go back to a #1 and start from scratch. The companies completely don't care what their established fanbase wants and that's sad, because those are the people who have been giving them money for years and now you've just slapped them in the face saying "we're gonna change it all so we can get new readers". IDW's previous "Transformers" universe anyone? sigh

All of that aside and what I'm leading to is.........I'm getting too old to be hiking all across the Quad-Cities looking for a new comic shop (and there are so few anymore). I'm disappointed in DC's "Rebirth" universe as it goes. Maybe the comic shop closing is a sign that I need to just quit DC Comics at this point. I already could see that DC was building up to another reboot, whether hard or soft, I can't say................but I don't need to see it. Comics I'm currently collecting, like IDW's "Sonic" and new "Transformers" titles, I just have to wait 6-7 months for the graphic novel now.......and I can order those on Amazon. I pre-ordered a "Transformers" artbook, the Flame Toys Megatron Furai model kit and Katie O'Neill's "The Tea Dragon Festival" on Amazon now--as I'd just put in a recent order for those through my comic shop and now it's clear I'll get none of them if I don't go looking in other places. The "Sonic" and "Transformers" graphic novels will be out in a couple months, picking up from where I left off and I plan to pre-order those soon, too. If DC reboots their universe and is consistent with graphic novel formats, then maybe one day I will get "Justice League" collected volumes of a new series.

There's still one more day left in this week............man, I hope nothing else weird and stuff happens tomorrow at work!

Summer Reading is coming up, my Library's program theme this year is "Showtime!"--a movie theme. So, I haven't heard what much of the focus is yet, but I'll know more in the next couple weeks. The departments have started to decorate for it and it will start on June 1st and go through the last Saturday in July.

You guys have any summer plans? :D