Good News blogthread,
Got over my week of depression by spending Thursday with my nana, I'll probably spend a lot more time with her in the coming weeks as she is thinking about not taking her Cumadin. See, she had a stroke a quite a few months back, and cumadin is an anti-coagulant. Now she is under 5' tall and maybe gets close to 80lbs if she is wearing a heavy coat, and she is afraid to move around in her house in case she falls or bruises herself and the bleeding doesn't stop. For most people, this wouldn't be a problem, they'd just apply pressure and wait it out. Well, she's only got the use of her left arm/hand due to polio. She hopes if she has another stroke while she is not on the cumadin that it will affect her right side. I'm afraid it will affect her left (this would mean she has no working arms/hands) or possibly she will die. This is devastating to me when I begin to put it in perspective and I realized that I have nothing to be sad about at this current juncture. I mean, if she is still happy about everything and is working to find ways to enjoy life, why shouldn't I?
So I am endeavoring to go over to her house more often so I can have her tell me about her life, I realized that I have small bits and stories, but never a full detail about how she met my grandpa, how my mom and uncles were like growing up? What it was like to grow up, and be extremely intelligent (she graduated high school at 16) but always be called handicapped and at some points I believe she has told us they called her retarded because her arm did not work. She turns 80 this year, she has already seen one of her granddaughters get married (4 grandkids, I'm the only son, youngest, and 60 years younger than her) so I think she may have resigned to the fact that she could go anytime.
tl;dr nana might die in the next year, want to spend more time with her
In other less bright news, I am no longer a red belt, I lost a rank for missing class without calling and I am now a blue belt 3rd stripe again. I didn't realize that I had messed up until I put on my old belt and walked into the school. The other students that had seen me around looked, I knew they all had known I was a red belt, only two of them asked me what happened. It really let me know that I fucked up, and I won't be doing that again.
tl;dr Lost rank in Kung Fu, was ashamed.
Finally, and on a more hilarious note,
last night I was looking around for extra bits for my Bretonnian army because I decided to do a fun little thing and paint squires for all of the knights that were characters in the army, since I wanted to have the model represented with a lance, but I didn't have a place ON the model to put the lance (see he was holding a sword to set him apart as a character) so I made little squires that run next to the knight (thematically of course) holding a lance and otherwise looking squire-ly. So, as I was looking for bits, I found a cool looking book, now the book was connected by 4 points, and it was a small book, about 1.5" across, and 1" tall. I had found the bit on the sprue in my closet, so I didn't really want to go out to the living room where I was working to grab clippers and cut it out, that'd take way too much time. So I tried to twist it, and push a bit, and pull, and I finally ended up placing my thumb on the book, and pushing forward while pulling with the other hand. Got the book out, and scraped my thumb. "ouch" I thought as I looked at the thumb and brought it to my mouth, I tasted blood, and so I walked out to the kitchen and grabbed three napkins to put on it (cheap napkins). I pulled the napkins away after I noticed the blood seeping through, and realized that I should probably put a bandaid on this bad boy, not just superglue (my usual remedy for small cuts). Luckily my flatmate is prepared for things like cuts, so when I didn't have a bandaid, he did and gave me one to place over it, now this is a large bandaid, and the cut just barely fits under the width of the bandaid. And it curves and isn't very clean because I was cut by plastic. I have done this before, on at least 2 occasions. I never seem to learn. Worst thing about getting a cut while working on miniatures, (as an aside, I am not squeamish at all when it comes to my own blood, generally it is blood of family members that I don't like to see) is that the thought process does not go "OH SHIT, I cut myself, I am bleeding, I gotta stop this" it goes "OH SHIT, I cut myself, now I'm gonna have to stop working on this, and go look for a bandaid, and get some neosporin, and get up from my seat where I'm comfortable, and oh I should probably stop this bleeding at some point"
tl;dr I didn't respect my miniatures, they conspired to cut me, did so.
But today is Saturday, and we are planning on playing a superhero based miniatures game that is very fun, I am excited! And the past 3 or 4 days, I have woken up very early and I feel great.