The D stands for Disappointment

@jenaciousd.bsky.social

490 Followers 784 Following

Midlife crisis, hyperfixations, cats, watercolours. Chronic fatigue and depression / anxiety. I need a nice cup of tea and a hug. PhD student in microfluidics with the OU.

It me, where “me” is a tubby 44 year old (at the time) in a mostly-knitted Captain America costume. The gloves and (not seen) boot covers were crocheted. The shield (Cap’s Spangle Circuit one, not the classic circular version) is knitted and braced inside with old bent knitting needles. This is my biggest achievement, and I include 3 degrees and half a PhD in that opinion.
A screenshot of Carrot, the weather app that’s almost as awful as I am 😍 The weather in Cambridge is 21°. The comment reads “RIP Sam Neill.” The advert under the hourly temperature changes reads “ROBOTS LIVE ROBOTS NUDE ROBOTS”, or alternatively “ROBOTS NUDE ROBOTS LIVE ROBOTS”, depending on whether you read down or across.
A fountain pen on a notepad, in front of a laptop. Coffee has happened. Maths is happening.
A watercolour pencil drawing of a Punk Skunk. It is facing us with its tail up but relaxed, and has its head turned to the right. The white stripes on its tail have been dyed turquoise and blurple and waxed into spikes. Its black fur has a blue undertone. It has silver claws, several small silver earrings, and a silver nose ring. It has heavy blue eyeshadow and dramatic eyeliner. Other than that, it’s as realistic as I could make it.
A small fluffy black cat is sitting in my lap. I’m wearing a white vest and pale khaki trousers because it is Too Hot. It is also Too Hot to have a Very Hairy Beast on my lap, but I know the rules.
A photo of my lap. I am wearing mostly-black jeans and a medium grey-blue t shirt. You can’t see my arms or face, because bodies and light don’t work like that. A small fluffy black cat is curled up on my folded legs (seriously, why do I find sitting like a small child comfortable now when it was constant fidgeting in school assembly?). By my right thigh, a ginger tabby is asleep , with her back pressed against the arm of the chair. You also can’t see the large iced coffee I drank an hour ago, because it’s now all in my bladder and this is not comfortable.
Proof of donation: $25 plus fees
2 cats are sitting on my lap. Ripley (black) is kneading my tummy. Both are vaguely irritated by a clap of thunder.
A silicone tea infuser in the shape of a manatee (or dugong; I’m unclear of the difference). It’s pale duck egg blue and smiling. Its front limbs are hooked over the edge of a white mug; the rest of it has small holes for brewing purposes, then its tail is again solid. It comes apart just below its armpits (finpits? Flipperpits?) for filling and emptying. Criminally, this was not sold as a “manatea”. Do better, marketers.
A watercolour painting of a macaw, from the shoulders up. It has a green back and top of head, a red-orange chest and neck, and its wing is fading from green to blue as the feathers get longer. Its beak is slightly open and it seems to have a cheeky look in its eye.
Time to flick my fleshy bop-it. In the TMNT title style. Over a picture of the turtles peering out from under a manhole cover in a city. I *am* proud of this, but only because I think I’ve actually managed to make Guy’s thought worse.
Elsa, a ginger tabby Siamese cross, is standing over a half-finished watercolour painting. She is very interested in it; her nose is about 1mm from the surface.
Dune poster generator (I’ve closed the tab but it’s easy to Google). It reads, rather unclearly: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA SANDWORMS Walking without rhythm; Shai Hulud! Not my best work, but I’m undercaffeinated
3 cats, painted wet in wet with fountain pen ink. The ink is Diamine’s Ancient Copper. There’s a large tabby sitting with its back to us in the middle, a small ginger & white sitting up and facing right in the bottom right corner, and what looks like a solid ginger cat with mumps in the top right. This is what happens when you paint small with clean water and no pencil sketch.
I prompted “Capybara science”. “ai” responded with a line drawing of a capybara in lab goggles with a flask, saying “EUREKA!” I love this.
Looming six foot red haired jump scare. In the TMNT logo.
A longhaired colourpoint cat has its head stuck in a cup (this is me, stuck with Python). It shakes its head and frees itself, hurrah! (this is me, figuring out where I went wrong and how to fix it). It falls off the table. (This is me, ending up with a problem that is different, but no less). Meta commentary: the nature of a gif is that it repeats, much as I repeat my coding woes, ad infinitum.
The result page for numberresearch.xyz Belphegor’s Prime has been searched ten times already. This delights and disappoints me in equal measures.
I am sitting on a purple sofa. You can see my dark grey jumper and black jeans. To my right is a ginger tabby; a small fluffy black cat is on my lap; and an absolute unit of a black cat is to my left, on a grey fleece blanket printed with bees. Nobody is bleeding, swearing, or walloping anybody else. This is *unheard of*.
A Budgerigarter snake. It is a lot less cursed than I might have been: it’s a green/yellow budgie, flying, with a snake’s tail. It’s very loosely painted, with the white of the paper being the white in its wings, and the dark stripe along its tail bleeding out into the surrounding brown. NGL, I really like the “splot the brush down” method of painting feathers.
A small tabby and white kitten has its arms through cage bars. It is scrabbling and screaming and has completely missed the wide open cage door immediately above its head.
A watercolour & gouache painting of a Wotsit Angel. “BE NOT AFRAID” is written next to it, and 7 rays of yellow & gold are emanating from its head(?).
A white octopus wears a red party hat and holds red and yellow balloons, against a Black Sea. It is smiling and rising up under a tall ship; the tips of 4 arms (cos octopuses have arms, not tentacles or legs) are above the water’s surface and appear to have just pulled party poppers. The ship appears unaware of the delightful surprise in store. The text reads “HAVE A KRAKEN DAY”.
The Middle Aisle of Lidl has some Things. This particular thing is a box containing a Silentnight snuggle pad. It’s a single bed-sized fake fur thing, with a wall / raised pillow around the perimeter. The second line of the description says human pet bed
A swatch page of 7 White Nights watercolour paints: Aureolin (PY151), Cadmium yellow medium (PY35), India yellow (PY150), Ochre light (PY53), Golden (PY3, PO13), Orange (PO64), and Titian red (PO36). All were painted wet on wet at the left of the page, and allowed to spread towards the right.
A small, fluffy, black cat is very close to the camera. She is looking slightly down and to the left.
A fluffy black cat is asleep in my lap. You can see a tuft of her paler finery-grey armpit hair, a front paw, and the side of her face. She is delightfully warm and the softest cat I’ve ever touched. Her timing, however, sucks.
Photo of a “which buildings are here” sign from the Open University. I say “buildings”, but it also includes locations of a couple of car parks, a spur, and a bear. Yes, a bear. “Mulberry Bear” is 6th on the list and in a noticeably larger font than the others.
A baby lying on her front in a pram. Her bum is in a great padded terry nappy, shaded by a canopy. She has an Immense Frown: the living embodiment of the 😠 emoji.
Portrait of Rory Kinnear as Chauncey Badminton, in the style of Obama’s HOPE poster. The slogan reads “EMPIRE”.
A small wild mouse. It’s sitting on the back of my hand, facing to the left. I’m (loosely!) holding its tail in my curled fingers - it could have run off without harm if it had wanted to.
The Moustache Is Worms. A simple line drawing of a nose and mouth, with a moustache in the expected place. The moustache, however is two fuzzy worms (strings not shown): the left is orange and the right is purple.
A fluffy black cat has just lain down on a pointy ginger tabby, who’s lying on a purple blanket. The ginger cat looks sleepy and slightly befuddled.
Text on a greyscale background, reading “GIVE ME PROMPTS TO HORRIBLY DRAW”.
Photo of a green parakeet. It’s wearing a green wig. With a blunt fringe and plaits that come out of the sides and curl back round. The bird looks rather pleased with itself and also as if it is planning trouble. The text reads Me: why am I so broke? Amazon: your parrot’s wig has been delivered
A photo of the street sign for “Carters Lane, known as Wibbly Wobbly lane”. It’s just outside Hitchin, and is the location of Wobbly Bottom Farm (which makes amazing goats’ cheese).
A small fluffy black cat is nesting under a purple blanket on a purple sofa. She was not amused when I pulled back the blanket to take this photo.
A Robinturong. It has a binturong’s head, hind legs, and tail, and a European robin’s body and wings. I’m sure it still smells of popcorn, but robins are fighty little sods and I wouldn’t want to get close enough to check.
Sketch of a pig. It is wearing a bowler hat. It’s also wearing the rest of Liza Minnelli’s best-known outfit from Cabaret.
Elsa, a 15 year old Siamese x ginger tom, 1 kidney, the brain cells of every other ginger cat on the planet. She’s asleep on her side between my legs and the arm of a purple sofa, looking very round. Her feets are tucked into her tummy fur, and her ears are enormous.
My 2026 word is, apparently, “sloppy”.
Elsa, a ginger tabby Siamese cross, is fast asleep on a purple sofa next to my leg. She goes beautifully round when relaxed. She dozed like this all through the new year fireworks.
The front cover of “Painting Birds - Expressive Watercolour Techniques” by Sarah Stokes. The cover art is a pair of psittacines (possibly parakeets?) on a branch. They are seen from behind, and are snuggled up together. One has its head rotated and buried in it shoulder feathers. They are both red-yellow on their bodies, shading into dark blue-green tails. The painting is tight and representational (lifelike and detailed) around their heads, and gradually becomes more loose and expressive (less detail, more impressions and spatters) towards the edges.
A bottle of BUMBU CREAM. The bottle is opaque white, with a gold coloured X on the front. Apparently it’s a cream-based drink with rum and spices, and is a product of Panama.
The front cover of the “Think Of A Number” book, which was a tie-in to the TV series. Among the things on the cover are Johnny Ball (wearing a crown and clutching a whole lot of Stuff), a large calculator, a plant, La Gioconda, and the constituent parts of the human body (8 pints of “blood”, a sack of coal, etc).
Southwold beach, ~9.15am Christmas Day. The sun is low and a strong wind from the left (north) has made really cool shadows on drifts of sand behind pebbles.
Bruce Banner, an 8kg formerly feral cat, is lying half on me and half on a fleece bee blanket. I am petting him and getting covered in fur. At one point, he very gently grabs my hand in his mouth and moves it from his tummy to his chin.
Rory Kinnear as Chauncey Badminton, painted in the style of the Obama HOPE poster. Instead of that, it reads EMPIRE.
I am sitting with my legs folded on a purple sofa. I’m wearing a green top and jeans that are black under the cat hair. One of the major donors of the cat hair (Ripley) has nested in my legs and is showing no signs of moving. She is a tiny cat in a huge fur coat, which is mostly black with gingery highlights and grey tufts. She appears very stern; she’s probably just waiting for a thought to pass by.
Me. In my kitchen. Wearing a Winter Soldier Christmas jumper (shades of blue with a grey star on the chest and one grey arm with a red star on the shoulder). I am a middle aged white woman with dark brown hair back in a loose ponytail, and rectangular glasses. I’m wearing black skinny jeans and socks (you can only see one) that are white with black squiggles. I have one hand on my knee and the other (the metal arm one) on my hip. My foot is up on the kitchen counter. I am 160cm tall; the counter is slightly higher than crotch height. This explains my expression.
A watercolour and pen painting of a puffin (head and shoulders). The puffin is wearing a red and white striped bobble hat and has 5 green & blue stripy fish in its beak. One of the fish has a gift tag that reads “Merry Fishmas”. The painting is very splashy and loose, with the outlines more of a suggestion than a boundary between colours. There are bluish splodges in the background, with runs and bleeds between the colours. Over it all are some spatters of white and dark blue. All in all, I really like how this turned out because I’m usually a lot more controlled and careful with paint. If I do it again, I’ll mix the dark feather colour to be more grey - it was an hour and a half class and I didn’t have time to adjust it.
Watercolour painting with ink pen and a touch of white gouache. It’s a very splattery, scribbly, pigeon facing left but with its head turned right. It has a big green splodge in its throat, pink on its tummy, and bits of blue on and under its wing. There’s a big streak of pink outside the lines, a patch of blue, and lots of splashes of pink from whacking my brush with a finger. The class was 90 minutes. It felt rushed but was a whole lot of fun.
2 pencil sketches from the medieval fair at Stow cum Quy on 30 August. On the left, a bearded man in a doublet, holding a longbow. On the right, a leather boot with the top folded over, laced up the side (in a holding it together way, not as a means of getting them on or off). They are very quick & scribbly. The proportions are reasonable, but you could never pick the man out of a line up unless he was with 5 short skinny women. Still, the exercise was quick sketches from life and I’m happy with the results.
Watercolour and gel pen painting of a mug and teapot. The mug is short and wide, lime green with an orange ring round the top edge, white inside, and has STAY WEIRD written on it in white. The teapot is also wide and squat, small, and tiger print: the top is gingery orange and it fades into cream at the bottom. I called this “My teapot’s too small” because that is the smallest mug I have, and the teapot only holds enough to fill it once, kinda.
Photo of an in-progress study of a (British) goldfinch’s head, in pastel pencil on Pastelmat. The head and shoulder feathers are getting there (the black bits need a lot of work, and Bruce Banner trod on the white). The beak was today’s 30 minutes and is about 95% done (and hence looks almost but not quite ok). Its eye is still an empty void, showing the bare card (colour “sanguine”). The background is smudgy greens, with more smudging to come once I’ve made all the mistakes round the edges. You can still see the texture of the sanding in places; I like this sometimes, but not in this piece. It’s 8cm square and the edges are taped off with masking tape covered in bumble bees.
Screenshot of a mapp showing Shingay cum Wendy, Abington Pigotts, and Litlington. All fine baby names / nicknames.
A gold-painted tin of powdered eggs, provided by the US “For European Recovery”. Gran originally got them; Mum inherited them; then Sister did. They’ve never been opened.
Screenshot of a map app (a mapp?) showing Great Bradley and Little Bradley (Suffolk).
A watercolour painting of a droplet of liquid surrounding a fibre. The background is grainy greyish purple and blue. The droplet is magnifying the section of the fibre it’s sitting on. At its widest point, the droplet measures 8cm across, on a 4cm diameter fibre. That all sounds very sensible and planned. It’s actually from a photo taken on my phone of a bit of cooking oil dolloped onto one of Elsa’s moulted whiskers, and was <1mm in diameter in reality.