Because of my central apnea I have somewhat of an aversion to sleep these days, and I find myself trying to do as little as possible on account of the reality that one of these days I may not wake up. I don’t particularly relish the idea of dying in my sleep, I’d rather keep going as long as I can and when I’m sick of it all jumping in a woodchipper and spraying my guys onto a giant canvas in a charade of modern art or something. So last night when I awoke from a brief nap at maybe three or four in the morning I went for a walk — especially with the farcical heat, I very much love the city late at night, long after all but the least law abiding bars have closed. I walked past the rather odd looking Taras H. Shevchenko Museum of Ukranian Canadian art and noticed this strange little statue in the window.
I do not particularly want to know if he is scared for his life or preparing to be… shall we say… amorous? Or worse, both?
Speaking of apnea, I have come to hate breathing. I never knew what a horrible feeling it was until I starting losing the ability to detect carbon dioxide building up in my blood (or whatever the mechanism that causes my apnea is). Every moment narrowly escaping suffocation, feeling death creeping closer and gasping to escape it. But when I forget, when I don’t know to breathe, what a sense of tranquility there is not having that need. Knowing that you don’t have to fight for survival over and over and over again without reprise is like some Promethean torment. I dread gaining similar awareness of my heartbeat, that marathon that never ends.
In good news, I have been tossing around ideas for a set of body modification and ritual themed rings, with the first couple that I’ll probably get finished being a pair of suspension themed rings, one with a classic Mustad-style hook, and the other with a Gilson-style safety hook. Pretty happy with how both of them are going. The only major design element I see changing still is that I haven’t put any effort yet into making sure the knots are correct… probably shouldn’t skimp on that since it’s not really any harder to do it right than to fake it. Other than that it’s just a matter of cleaning it up, making it all look nice and perfect, and then the normal steps of making a mold and casting them in metal.
The other good news is that I got a new throttle in the mail today for my electric trike project and now the motors are turning, so I can finally get to putting that “super wheelchair” together. Should be a lot of fun. My good/bad news is that after several engine swaps my truck isn’t missing any of the AC components — because goddamn is this looking to be one hell of a hot summer — but a lot of them are rusted out and dead, so it’s going to have air conditioning shortly, but it won’t be as cheap as simply charging up the system. My bad news is that my daughter’s health is not improving with medication so I think she’s going to miss the remainder of the school year and come back up here sooner than expected (at least that part of it is good, in a way) for medical care.
For whatever reason work wasn’t going well today. Not badly, just slowly. But I did make two very nice rings, a simple skull ring of my classic type with aventurine eyes, and a vampire skull ring with beautiful sapphire eyes and a great glowing citrine on the back that sits in the middle of a massive engraved spiral that fills the whole back of the ring. The lower jaw has been left off and I have carved monster/vampire teeth into the uppers as well. The funny part of the story is the reason I did it like that is because when I was mounting the eyes I wasn’t paying attention and hit the jaw with my soldering iron and melted part of it off… so I just ran with it.
Click either set of thumbnails to jump to the shop page on Etsy to see everything bigger or to buy:
After “work” we went across the street to Zocalo where I had a meal with pork sausage as the centre, which was very nice, especially because it’s not something I get to eat often. I’m looking forward to the rest of the night because I finally got my hands on an Iron Sky DVD and am greatly looking forward to. I admit that I did download a German cam, but the quality was terrible and it crashed the decoder twenty minutes in, so this should be much nicer. I admit that I’m not expecting a lot, but I hope it will be some campy fun with some nice Nazi UFO space and moon sequences.
Other than that, I’ve been using the new Photoshop, CS6, and I think the only feature that I use on any regular basis (over CS4 which had been my workhorse for the last couple years) is the oil pain filter. I find that it’s exceptional for cleaning up faux-vector linework, which may come as a surprise!!! All of the linework on the BME 2012 was first drawn by hand, then redrawn on the computer, and finally, run through this filter. I used the same process on a shirt that I recently drew for a friend’s food business, and I really recommend it. It seems to make things “flow” better. Of course you can use it for photos too, but it’s kind of a one-trick pony there and I see it getting old real quick.
And when the movie is over I will read the latest issue of Crossed:Badlands before bed, and remember, there are lots of free (and I’m talking guilt-free-free, not pirated-free) issues of the Crossed webcomic online with nine issues published as of this writing. If you’re an adult with a taste for the perverse and violent, there’s something special about this filth.
A guy from Rogers spent all of yesterday rebuilding the cable box right over my front door, which I guess services the entire building. Apparently they were getting tons of complaints (from us included) about the quality of service — drop-outs and bandwidth not being what it was promised — and when he looked at the box, he discovered that the whole thing was one big rotted rusted mess. We pay for “up to 75mbps” and have been lucky to get half that, with it being in single digits many days, if we can connect at all. But today after the repair, things are looking up:
That’s much better. Hopefully it stays like that. I have gotten excited about good numbers before, only to be disappointed a few days later.
Other than that, I feel pretty crummy because I didn’t get as much sleep as I should of due to my neighbors screaming inconsolably at each other for two and a half hours starting at 4AM, but I’ve cast a pile of jewelry that I want to work on now, and I’m also working on a new clock that I expect I’ll post in a couple days.
