Well, I'm outta here! I may be able to log on in the hospital but there's a good chance that I won't be able to, and I won't have my phone with me either (and I'm a cheap bastard that stays in a group ward with no phone — although really, I prefer the company to a private room anyway). With luck and forceful “let me go” demands I'll be released on Thursday, but it could be as late as Saturday even in a best case scenario. I'll try and take pictures of the surgery if they allow me to stay conscious (I really want to watch, and experiencing getting my bones cut apart should be “interesting”).
Anyway, here's the ad I'm running in Orbax's latest… I'm going to go get my sketchbook and a few markers, a bathrobe and a toothbrush, pull a few books to read, and keep my fingers crossed that while I'm gone the belt for my woodcarver comes, and the hot water gets turned back on…
Oh, and if something terrible happens (
which is EXTREMELY UNLIKELY), all rights to any BME properties that I own obviously go to Rachel who I trust to continue running them properly and with respect to the community that created BME, my library of books go to my friend Saira, and I would appreciate it if my paintings are split among my friends as they see fit. The rest of my stuff is not particularly interesting. My ashes should be spread between the farm I grew up on and in Lake Ontario.
So I come home from picking up some groceries so I'll have food when I get home from surgery this weekend, and I see there's a dude messing around with my gas meter… I'm like, “what are you doing”, and he replies that he's disconnecting my gas, which of course means no hot water…
I tell him my bill is 100% up to date and this has to be some mix up, and that I'm going in for surgery in the morning so it's extremely important that this not happen. He tells me that he doesn't have any choice, but that if my bill is paid up, they'll reconnect me this afternoon so I shouldn't worry about it. So he turns off the gas and leaves.
I call up the gas company's collections service, and they confirm that my bill not only has no past due amount, but that it actually has a zero balance (because one of the things I do before surgery is make sure that everything is totally paid), and that this is an administrative error, either due to my bank or due to them. Either way, they show my account as totally paid up and owing nothing. However, they don't have any appointments left today, nor do they have any tomorrow morning, so they can't reconnect my hot water before my surgery.
So not only do I have to find somewhere else to crash tonight so I can have a shower before surgery (so I won't be reachable by either computer or phone), but Phil also won't be able to work tomorrow afternoon on BME stuff because I need him to stay here to wait for their reconnect people because they have to have someone here, otherwise I have no hot water when I get home from the hospital… Very, very irritating… Real nice…
The entire day was spent cleaning this place top to bottom. There's still a little to do, but it really doesn't look like the same house any more at all! Whew! Anyway, I'm starving and am going to order a cheap pizza and relax, pay the last of my bills, program the PVR to record everything that'll be on while I'm in the hospital, and crash out…
Oh, and I drew the first “official” page for my kid's book in the last day or two. I've been working with COPIC markers on glossy inkjet paper, which is quite interesting to work on because it absorbs the ink so quickly — you can lay down fairly heavy ink and it doesn't smudge at all. The downside is that you can't mix ink on the paper, but I'm running with this experiment for now (the nice thing about the markers I'm using is that I can mix my own inks so I can create whatever subtle colour variations I need manually).
I haven't been online here much the past view days (barely at all, really) because I'm been scrambling to get a ton of stuff done before my surgery on Wednesday which will at least temporarily take me out of commission. I had a long day of work today prepping about three weeks of ModBlog entries in advance (please excuse the typos which I'm sure are there)… Caitlin make me a bunch of delicious food to eat while I was working and left it for me yesterday but I guess because I didn't lock it up well enough it disappeared into someone else's belly so I went without my lunch sadly.
I had a dream last night that I was on Hell's Kitchen — and won: not that I can cook. So for supper I made a nice light meal of onion and yellow pepper in a fresh lemon and dill sauce with bay scallops on brown rice. I drizzled it with a sweet chili sauce, which was a mistake in hindsight, but it was still very good. I don't cook much with dill but I'm trying to expand my palette because I'm getting bored of making variations on the same thing over and over (not that this is so different).
I also did a little bit of painting this afternoon — other than a tinted glaze that I'll try and add tomorrow the
Rookaiju painting is finally done. I haven't really painted very much (essentially not at all) over the summer; just haven't felt it. But I hate having incomplete work lying around and more than anything I hate staying still because nothing makes pain worse than sloth — no joke, I've found that the best way to deal with pain is obsessive workaholism because it keeps my mind off it. Extreme anger works as well, but I despise anger (is that statement an oxymoron?)…
Tomorrow is a day of cleaning this place up so everything is neat and tidy. I wanted to move out in August but I don't think it's going to happen until October for a variety of reasons. Hopefully I can get my spare room back soon now that I have my woodworking gear because it can't stay on my main story… I really want to get all my paintings framed, especially now that I know how to write the code to make my router carve and miter custom frames for me.
I got a bunch of rope but I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but it's always good to have rope around. It's really strong. I could hang a four hundred and fifty pound guy with it. I don't really remember any knots from sailing school very well other than how to tie a hangman's noose…
Well, I think I'll do a little more work and then call it a night.
I have a few good interviews sitting on my desktop at 95% — I'd meant to put them up this week but it's been a bit of a crazy week. With luck I'll still be able to post them before Wednesday but it may fall through the cracks…
I just tore the traction belt on the router! It's just a $3 piece, but it's a totally non-standard size (15″x13″ 120 grit dry aluminum oxide) so I've had to order it online (I got five)… I was initially kind of freaked out because when I called tech support they're like “sorry, we can't help you because you're not in the continental USA” and wouldn't give me any information (they have some sort of intense distribution deal they're hammering out with Sears or something), but luckily I found the answer almost immediately in the user forums for the machine…
So no more carving for a few days, but that's probably good because it's really incredibly distracting and is taking away from more important tasks! So back to real work for me…
