
wednesday - april 29, 2026.
hello, it's been about 7 months and a lot has changed! i am happy to report we've been living in san francisco since november and we're having a wonderful time. i love our apartment! i love the city! i love my life! i miss my friends and i think about my former students every day, but we're making more friends out here and i'm traveling back to tennessee for my students' graduation, so it's all good. since moving, i have graduated from esthetician school and earned my license. i even made time to draw a comic about a day in the life of an este student at my school, but then i got too overwhelmed to actually update the site til now. you can find it up there, if you want. now i'm working on sending out my resumé to local spas, but for the most part, my days are open to creative pursuits and dog walking.
speaking of creative pursuits, i'm working on zines again and drawing my own tarot deck.
the zines i'm working on are one-pagers i'm making to leave in locations here in the city. i have closed my etsy shop and really just want to trade or sprinkle them around my neighborhood. that said, i still love all the zinesters i've met through the internet, so i'm offering free downloads of my new zines on my ko-fi page. if you'd like, you can donate but don't worry about it if you can't/don't want to. times are crazy and you shouldn't have to pay money every time you want to enjoy some art.
for the tarot deck, i am doodling in a composition notebook and when i find a doodle i like, i upload a photo of it to procreate and start building out the idea into a completed card. i don't know if i'll ever sell the deck when i finish it, but i'm so into it and excited about it right now, i'm not really worrying about where it will end up right now. i just want to keep working on it until its done and i can get a few copies printed for myself and some close confidants. i've been taking notes on this project for nearly 10 years, now, and i'm expecting i'll keep working on the drawings even after i get it printed... a lifelong project, possibly.
my hope is that now that i'm making zines again, i'll finally finish the zine archive on this site, but i'm not in a rush to do it since i have all my zines archived on IG. you know where to find it.
and if you'd like to find me, write me a letter and I might respond to you here. also, if you'd like to get an email notifying you of future updates to the site, sign up for my substack and i'll let you know when to check back in.
love y'all!
allie
current mood:
loved
current music: Gin Blossoms - Until I Fall Away
thursday - september 18, 2025.
SITE UPDATES: updated the comic.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR: this week I received a kind message on my guestbook from Nyx, one of my OG zine friends. she writes:
I am perpetually late to everything... However, I love your site! Love the vibes, the feel the comics. All the good stuff. All the best wishes for your adventures.
heya, Nyx. thank you for your kind guestbook signature. I made myself sit down and finish the newest comic so I could post it at the same time as this response, so your words really matter! I hope the site will be even cooler when you come back. you know, I’m sure we’ve all experienced a time when we were scrolling back on someone’s IG and somewhere in the feed our thumb hit a photo twice in rapid succession, and, oh, shit, we just liked a photo from 9 years (!) ago and now they’re going to get a notification and know we were scrolling back too far on this public record of the events of their life that they chose to share and that’s so embarrassing. everything we post on social media stays out there, but also has the briefest lifespan and then we’re all supposed to move on to the next thing.
I’m hoping to build this website out so that there’s more stuff on it than anyone could look through in one sitting. I think it’d be cool if visitors felt like they had a good reason to come back. while cleaning out my classrooms and my desk last spring, it struck me that I felt like my legacy was my students’ work, and I didn’t have much of my own work to point to. how do you update your resume when you don’t know how to talk about yourself anymore? compiling projects from multiple social media accounts is helping me figure out how to talk about myself as someone other than a teacher or former teacher, and creating the place where all the creations converge is more fun than I remember.
so we don’t need to worry about lateness on this website. there’s no pressure to keep current and no shame in scrolling all the way back. I’ll keep adding to it and it’ll be here when you’re ready to come back. my inspiration for the vibe is the liminal dusk (or dawn) creeping over the back yard. the wee hours when I would be up coding because I was old enough to set my own bedtime but not responsible enough to make myself study and complete homework. not much has changed. part of what I enjoy playing with here is the way time spirals and overlaps. I know the versions of myself who did exactly this same thing in my teens and twenties. can this get me closer to the versions of myself who continue in the future?
love,
allie
if you'd like to write a letter to the editor, sign my guestbook and I might respond to you here.
current mood:
pleased
current music: Jens Lekman - Candy From A Stranger
sunday - september 7, 2025.
SITE UPDATES: I spent some time updating the banners on the home page and reformatting the text throughout the site. I also spent a good chunk of time working on the zine gallery images. there's still a lot of work to be done, but I think you can get an idea of what I'm going for as far as the gallery layout. I'll keep working on it. no comic this week, but I already know what the next one will be about, so I'll update it next week.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR: this week I heard from one of my zine friend, Kali Kambo. she writes, "Hi Allie! Your new site looks great!"
hello, Kali! thank you for your encouraging words. I sometimes feel like I'm the only one visiting my site, but I keep showing up because I like the vibe. making something for my own enjoyment is a good enough reason to keep working on the site, but it is very exciting to know I have a friend visiting, too. thank you, honey! I hope I've improved it some more by the next time you visit!
love,
allie
if you'd like to write a letter to the editor, sign my guestbook and I might respond to you here.
this past week I ordered a hobonichi for the first time ever. I've had my eye on them for 20 years now, so it was about time. I ordered the tamagotchi collab from JetPens, and it got here so quickly, I decided to make an unboxing video because I was so excited. the video did pretty well, and made me want to actually do something with the footage I filmed of my July stationery haul. soon.
I went to the allergist and discovered I am itching constantly because I am allergic to absolutely everything in East Tennessee. I really can't understand why since I was born here and have never lived anywhere else, but, apparently, my hometown is as tired of me as I am of it. good news is, I already know from our month in San Francisco that my allergies are a lot calmer on the other side of the country, so I guess it's a good thing we're moving.
I also made an appointment with my massage therapist for a private yoga session. she's been working for the physical therapist's office chris used to go to after his motorcycle wrecks for several years, but opened her own offic this month, which means sh'es able to offer more than massages. we laughed the whole session, especially when she referrered to Cat Cow as Le Meow et Le Moo. I'm going to try to go see her a few more times before we leave town.
yesterday, Chris and I took our last load of books to McKay's and walked out with $200. we went to the cinebar for dinner and a movie: we saw Weapons, which was good. we don't go to the cinebar often, but it is a lot of fun and it always makes the movie feel special. it's strange when we go, however, because the theater has changed so much. back in the 90's, that theater was my first job, and it's been totally renovated since then. it used to look like a place for kids to hang out, and now it looks like a man cave. and it's always funny to see me students working there. time keeps on slipping into the future.
this week, I'll be packing up stuff in rooms that need painting so we can move everything out of those rooms next week when the painters come. the lvingroom, kitchen, and garage will need the most work. it looks like we'll be fully packed up and moving the last week of october. Jackie is going on his first road trip across america!
current mood:
productive
current music: Nick Drake - Pink Moon
friday - august 29, 2025.
we now have a guestbook button above (the update section) and a button to link to my site below (the update section), so make sure to leave me a message and add me to your links pages. I've also spent some time making separate pages for the the zine gallery and I'm thinking about the most efficient way to start adding photos and desciptions of the zines, but I still haven't quite figured it out, yet. oh, and obviously there is a new comic as well. adding a little bit every day is great and I'm so grateful I have the time to do this right now, but I sometimes forget how much I manage to get done until I sit down to write it all out.
current mood:
pleased
current music: Smashing Pumpkins - Hummer
wednesday - august 27, 2025.
very excited to have found webdeck player so I can add a mix to the site. this was one of my plans for this site from the beginning since there are so many songs that remind me of being up late in the summer working on my website when I was a teen. at first it was listening to my parents cds on the desktop CD-ROM. when I moved out, it was downloading mp3s from napster and, later, limewire. I picked some oldies from this time and some new favorites I enjoy playing at dusk in the summer when it finally cools off enough to drive with the windows down. I hope you enjoy listening to this little mix while exploring the different parts of my site. and please bookmark me and come back. I keep adding stuff all the time!
I also set up a guestbook and I'll make a special icon for it to link at the top, soon. if you have a sec, please sign it before you go. I'd like to make it like a 'letter to the editor' section to answer your questions or give you advice publicly. nothing too deep necessary, although deep is fun, too. I'd just love the chance to make the site a little more interactive with my internet friends, you know? random hellos would be fun, too.
something very cool and unexpected about working on this site for a few weeks is that it's helping me find new ways to think and talk about myself. I was a teacher for the better part of a decade, so that was a very distinct way I could talk about myself for a long time. when you're a teacher, it's easy to feel like your achievements are the growth you see in your students. but once you're not a teacher anymore, you realize that's your students' achievements, not your own. pulling together old art projects and making new art for the site has reminded me of who i am outside of that role I'm no longer in.
future plans for more sections on the site: knitted dolls, masks, mixtapes (?), knitted shawls, vlogs (alphabet superset and more), and maybe section for pages from my old diaries. we'll see.
current mood:
excited
current music: Hazel English - More Like You
monday - august 25, 2025.
this week I got a late start on my comic and didn't actually finish it until sunday. I'm proud of it because for a while I was really worried that my plan for the fourth panel would be too ambitious. I don't spend a lot of time drawing rooms or landscapes or backgrounds, so when it comes time to draw a figure in a space other than white void, I'm always worried I'm going to mess up the drawing. making a rough sketch by hand in my sketchbook and then really figuring it out on procrete later helps me get around that fear.
I also added the skeleton of a zine gallery this week. there was one night this week when the book I was reading before bed, The Corrections, made me so anxious I couldn't sleep and got up and made a list of all of the zines I've made over the years. right now there's just some thumbnails and the list, but I'm working towards photos and descriptions for every zine. I'm interested to see how long that takes.
I still haven't put the etsy shop back up. I put it on vacaton mode at the beginning of July before we left for our San Francisco trip and while we were out there, I saw that etsy was allowing assholes to sell 'alligator alcatraz' merchandise. I don't know why, but that's it. I don't want to sell on etsy anymore. I know it's not even the 5th shady thing they've done but something about this specific instance of allowing people to profit off of hate just threw me over the edge.
SO if YOU'D like a copy of a zine, just shoot me an email and tell me what you want and what your address is and I'll send you one. If not paying me makes you feel weird, I'll let you venmo me, but I really never made zines to sell them in the first place anyway. Also, I'd love to trade, but my address will be changing a few times over the next 4-5 months as we get out to San Francisco and find ourselves a longterm rental, so I might need a raincheck if you make an offer.
in addition to another diary comic, this week I'd like to figure out how to make a blinky button for people who want to share my site and some navigation buttons for all the different pages. I might also start working on a links page or even finish that dreaded 'about me' page I've had in the drafts for weeks... we'll see.
current mood:
anxious
current music: Longwave - Tidal Wave
monday - august 18, 2025.
I started coding this website earlier this month after we got home from our trip to San Francisco. I was thinking about starting (another) substack because I had a new idea, but I just couldn't stand the thought of starting (another) social media account. I'm so tired of looking for resources on how to do social media well and that equating to getting subscribers, getting views, getting paid for your creativity. it's very uninspiring. SO I decided to to go back in time to 1996 and blow the dust off of my html/css skills and start a personal site.
this week I've taught myself how to make gifs in procreate, and I'm inspired by my own website to make the stupid little doodles in my compositon notebook into stupid little animations for this site. I can't remember the last time a social media platform inspired me to make something. obviously a personal website is the answer.
I'm only able to spend time working on this site because I am in between things career-wise, so if you would like to pay me to do something fun and awesome, please let me know. in the meantime, I am working hard to get myself and my husband moved to San Francisco, hopefully in the next couple of months. it is a big transition, but I'm looking forward to living somewhere where we both feel inspired!
future plans for this website include posting a comic every week, probably on fridays. I'll still use my current substack newsletter so if you're subscribed to that, expect an email reminding you that I updated the site. also, I'm working on a zine archive. this will be a longterm project. at the time of posting this, I've made 91 zines and the only record I have of them currently is my warglitter zines IG profile. my intention is to include photos and descriptions of all my zines, so it's going to take a while, but I will keep the archive visible while it's in progress.
let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see here. I make all kinds of stuff, so I could make all kinds of sections for the site. if you're also on neocities, you can follow my site and leave me a message. I'd love to check out your site, too.
current mood:
nostalgic
current music: Soundgarden - 4th of July
