I haven’t used it yet, but all in all I’m pretty pleased with the purchase.

Of course now I have to pay for it though, which is fine, I do get a paycheque and can pay it off bit by bit, which was my original plan, but I’ve also decided to discount ALL of my paintings and ACEOs on Etsy to speed up the process and to also make room in my tiny house for all of the new stuff I’m working on. Most of the paintings have been discounted by more than $100 so make sure you take a look!

I’ve also lowered my ACEOs to $12 a piece, including shipping, and I’m probably not going to make more of them because they were such a pain in the ass to do the first time and I didn’t really enjoy the process at all.

So that’s that.

Yesterday was Madison’s 14th birthday and we went to the Mandarin, which is only the 2nd time I’d ever been to one. It was…weird. Buffets are just weird to me. Communal eating. I can’t say I’m a huge fan, to be perfectly honest, and I over-ate which I think is a thing for buffets and then I felt like garbage and I don’t think I’m going to be going to one of those again for a very long time. Too expensive, the food was just “okay” and the desserts were just kinda “meh” (although Blake thoroughly enjoyed his homemade waffles and ice cream).

After dinner we went to the mall to get my camera and after that we tried to do a cache in the parking lot of the mall but all signs point to its being muggled so we never found it. Bummer.

But that’s okay, despite feeling like barfing and everything, we all had a pretty good night, Madison had a good birthday (she got her badminton set yesterday morning so she was really happy) and I’ve got no complaints!

Today is a dressing change day so my nurse, Janice, is coming which is nice because since my wound isn’t as serious as it was before, I never get to see her. I get Cheryl instead. However Cheryl is getting laser eye surgery today so she’s not available.

It’s a strange relationship you have with these nurses. You’re thankful for them because you’d really be up shit creek without them but at the same time, you get really sick of seeing their faces because you want to be better already.

Next week, I think, I see the surgeon and hopefully she’ll have good news for me. When I had my CAT scan last week, they told me the pseudocysts on my pancreas had shrunk but they didn’t say by how much. I’m hoping it’s by a lot so I can get this final surgery out of the way. I worry about this surgery constantly because the recovery time for it is 8 weeks so if I have it like, RIGHT NOW, I would be more or less healed for our anniversary party in July but then if I have it the week after our anniversary party in July, then I’ll be just healed enough by the time Squam rolls around to be okay for that. If it can’t be fit in in between either of those windows, then I’m looking at the end of September, which is going to cause problems with my wound healing between now and then because of heat and moisture.

So like I said, hopefully Dr. Hanrahan will have good news for me because this started taking its toll on me a while ago and I’m just ready for this nightmare to be over. :o/

Lately I’ve been having nightmares about waking up in the hospital and being told that this whole thing happened again, that I’d missed another 2 months of my life that I don’t remember.  I wake up after these nightmares in a cold sweat, usually around 2am, and I have to come into my office to look at the date. The odds of it happening again are pretty slim, I’m told, so that’s good but still…

Okay I have half an hour left of work and then I’m putting my tired ass back in bed. Today’s a painting day, which I am greatly looking forward to because it feels like it’s been so long!

I hope you have a fantastic Thursday!

The children together, got me two of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer graphic novels (which I have to get to reading, I still haven’t read all the ones they got me last year…), then Wes gave me some pictures of flowers he drew in school and a poem where he said I was “amazing”, “artistic”, “cool”, “outstanding”, “loving”, “extraordinary” and that I mean so much to him and that he loves me “more than Mars”. He also gave me a Dragon’s Egg bath bomb from Lush.

Madison on the other hand…I knew she was up to something because all day Saturday she was in her room and she was going through my paint and asking to borrow paint brushes and stuff but I was not prepared for the awesomeness that would be bestowed upon me yesterday morning.

SHE PAINTED A NUDE PORTRAIT OF ME!!!!!!!!!

I’m not even kidding, check this out:

This is the original photo, which Blake gave to her (he gave her a bunch to choose from):

HOW FUCKING FUNNY IS THAT???
God, I love this kid.
Best. Present. Ever!!!

So that was the present portion of Mother’s Day. After that, Blake talked to Ronny and Alex to see if they wanted to go geocaching in Utopia with us, they said yes, and we scrambled to get ready for adventuring! I decided to have a peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich for breakfast because I never get to have those since they’re 590 calories but I figured that we’d be doing lots of physical activity so it would be okay and as it turns out, it was more than okay (more on that at the end).  Smucker’s makes this new strawberry jam that comes in a squeeze bottle which means it’s SMOOTH, there are no nasty strawberry chunks in it like regular jam which is awesome because I HATE THAT and think it is BEYOND DISGUSTING.

Anyway, I ate it in the car on the way to Ronny and Alex’s house and it was fantastic. I also brought 2 bottles of water to bring geocaching and a half bottle of diet Coke.

We picked Alex and Ronny up at their house and then they followed us to Utopia. We got to the Tiffin Conservation area around 2pm and the adventure started immediately with a cache right6 outside the parking lot called “Log Licence Renewed”, which I found inside a LOG! It was a microcache so we all signed our names on the log and I used that opportunity to take pictures of the trillium that blanketed the entire forest floor in some places, like where that cache was:

I think I’ve mentioned it before but these are Ontario’s provincial flower and it’s illegal to pick them.

We hiked for about 20 minutes to the next cache on our list, which was “Don’t Cut the Red Wire” which all of us did last time we were out there, but we wanted Ronny to get that one too because it’s kind of a neat one so that’s what we did. This is Blake and Ronny figuring out the first part of the cache:

And this is what the device that tells you the coordinates for the final cache looks like:

There’s a legend on a piece of paper in the cache with the device (which IS the cache) and you touch the wires with a metal wand so the little lights on the left light up which corresponds with letters and that tells you the coordinates for the final cache. I forgot to take pics of the final cache, although it wasn’t anything spectacular anyway.

On our way to going back to Wonderball, we saw this:

No idea what kind of leg that is or what might have eaten the rest of it…

Next we went back to Wonderball because we bought a stamp pad to use instead of the crappy marker that was in the cache so I could get a better stamp, plus Ronny didn’t come with us when we went to it the first time so we wanted to show it to him. I didn’t bother taking pics of the actual cache this time because I did last time so you’ve already seen it, but I did take some pics of my favourite people while we were there:

And this is what the stamp looks like, because like I said, it’s a letterbox cache:

A few feet from Wonderball, I found a really awesome skull of something, but I don’t know what. I carried it around with me for a while intending to keep it, but I decided to leave it by a tree instead because really, what was I going to do with it? And also I didn’t want it in my bag the whole day either and Blake didn’t want it in his so I just decided to leave it behind. Here it is though, in case anyone has any idea what it might be of?

My guess was a raccoon.

After Wonderball, we went after “ROY G BIV”, which we ultimately never found and that bugged the crap out of me because it was a letterbox cache too. :o( I did take a pic of these little purple flowers on the way to finding it though:

Oh and I took pics of my friends…

And my kid…

Then we went to find “Moontaker”, which was another letterbox and I got this cool stamp:

Almost all of the caches in this area were placed in 2007 for the Central Ontario Geocachers’ Spring Fling “mega event” and as such, the theme was 007, hence the names of a lot of them. Like “Cachino Royale” was another one we found and “003 1/2″ and “Moneypenny’s Diaries”. I’ve never seen a James Bond movie so I’m not sure if the others were named after them or not, like the next one we went to was called “Cones Around the Bend” and it was a camouflaged microcache hidden in a goddamn pine tree! Those are THE WORST! But Madison found it with her eagle eyes and I took these pictures of her (she didn’t want her picture taken but it was Mother’s Day and we waited extra time when getting ready for her to iron her hair [who flat iron's their hair to go hang out in the fucking woods?] so we said TOO BAD!)

Alex is in the background, signing the log.

Madison is ticklish!

Madison died.

This is Wes opening a cache but I forget which one and now that I look at the list, I think we might have missed this one when we were logging at the end of the day because it’s definitely not any of the ones on the list Blake sent us…hmmm….must investigate later…

Madison finally said “okay FINE, ugh” when I pestered her about taking her picture so I got these shots. She’s so fucking pretty, I don’t know why she doesn’t want her picture taken all the time.

Plus she’s wearing my shirt.

“Get it over with, mother.”

And our final cache of the day was called “You Have a Nasty Habit of Surviving” and it was another letterbox! YAY! (Those are my favourite, in case you couldn’t tell.) Here’s the stamp from that:

It wasn’t a microcache so I dunno why the stamp says “micro”. Maybe that was the name of the person who made it.

By the time we got back to the parking lot, it was 6pm which meant we’d been hiking up and down hills and traipsing through the woods and muck for 4 HOURS!

We were all pretty hungry and thirsty so we decided to meet up at South St. Burger Co. for burgers and poutine and milkshakes made out of REAL ice cream! I know I’ve posted about this place before, but I cannot sing its praises enough. They use grass fed, organic beef and you can really tell the difference in their burgers. I mean, they actually taste like BEEF, not SALT to cover up the taste of crappy beef like McDonald’s or Burger King or Wendy’s. (Actually I’ve never had Wendy’s so I’m just guessing.) It’s still fast food, but it just tastes so much better and it feels so much more nourishing, if that makes sense. You don’t feel like shit after you eat it like I often do after I eat a McMeal. It IS pretty pricey though for fast food. We got 4 burgers, 2 large poutines (with a coupon where you got one for $2), onion rings, 3 softdrinks (2 smalls, 1 large) and 2 milkshakes and it was apparently almost $60. I think it’s worth it though.

While we were at South St. I logged my physical activity into the app I use to track my calories called My Fitness Pal and it said that for 4 hours of hiking I burned 1409 calories! My daily calorie allotment is only 1200! Even after my cruddy breakfast, my fast food dinner and the ketchup chips I ate later on, I was UNDER calories by 666! hahaha!

Sunday nights is Game of Thrones and Mad Men night so after dinner, we all parted ways and would meet up again at our house around 8:30pm for Game of Thrones.

On our way home, I was feeling pretty good and I thought I deserved a treat since I got out of the house and did so much physical activity, so I asked Blake if we could stop off at the grocery store. He said okay. I also informed him that I would be going into the store and getting ketchup chips and paying with my debit card all by myself. He asked if I could also get margarine and I said okay.

So that’s what I did. I went in the store, and I was pretty much shaking uncontrollably, but I know the grocery store pretty well, especially the junk food aisle, so I went in with my bag that Blake gave me (like, reusable grocery bag) and first I looked at the cake but there was nothing inspiring so I went to the junk food aisle and a regular sized bag of ketchup chips was $2.99 but a FAMILY sized bag was $2.66 so I got the bigger one (obvs) and then I went to the margarine aisle and was shocked at how much margarine is. It’s like 7 fucking dollars for the kind we get! (Olive Oil Becel) I couldn’t even believe it!

Then I took my items to the checkout and there was a line so I wanted and tried not to freak out and then another cashier opened her checkout so some people left to go to hers but I stayed in my original line since the lady in front of me was almost finished. When it was my turn everything was just a blur. I couldn’t tell you what I said to the guy who was checking me out. I know I was nice and polite to whatever he said, but that would be all I could tell you. While I was pressing the buttons on the debit machine, he put my stuff in my bag to which I thanked him for, and then the transaction was approved so I removed my card from the machine, put it back in my wallet, said goodbye and took my bag and went back to the car.

When I got in the car Blake asked me if everything went okay and I said it did and he left it at that. Inside my head I was going over everything with a fine tooth comb, trying to figure out which part didn’t go right but there was nothing so I was kind of overwhelmed with that. I didn’t know how to feel or react so I just kind of didn’t. I know I could do that because I knew I had enough cash in my wallet to cover the purchase if the debit machine didn’t work for some reason. Also as a backup, I knew there was enough money in both of our bank accounts to cover it so if one didn’t go through for some reason, I could use the other, but I knew it would go through because we had the money.

All in all, it was a positive experience. I don’t know what got into me that I thought I could do that, but I did and all went well so I’m not traumatized. I still doubt very much that I could walk there and do the same thing but maybe eventually…I know there are 3 letters waiting for me at the post office if I ever got up the courage to go there and get them but who knows when that will happen…

Anyway, we came home and I had a shower because I was disgusting and sweaty and just plain gross and my wound was seeping through its bandage so we had to change my dressing anyway. There was no more breakdown than before but the fact of the matter is, the damn thing’s not going to heal under these conditions and there’s nothing that can be done. All we can do is try to keep it from getting infected between now and whenever I have surgery.

At about 8:30pm, Ronny and Alex got here and we said goodnight to Wes, then the rest of us watched Game of Thrones. Then Ronny & Alex left and Blake and I watched Mad Men. Then Blake went to bed and I watched The Pitch, which is a terrible show about D level ad agencies trying to win accounts with terrible ideas. It’s kind of horrific, actually.

And then I could barely keep my eyes open so I went to bed! Then this morning Cheryl came and changed my dressing again, I had a nap, then I woke up, started writing this post and now it’s almost 4:30pm.

Madison and I are going to watch Toddlers & Tiaras and I’m going to work on my painting for the rest of the day. I’m still exhausted from yesterday, like, barely keeping my eyes open kind of exhausted, but maybe if I drink a diet Coke, the caffeine will kick my ass into gear and I can get some work done.

I hope all the mamas out there had a good one yesterday! Happy Mother’s Day!

The first thing that’s really getting under my skin is Madison’s grade 8 Ottawa trip. Grade 8 graduation is kind of a big deal here and I’m told it’s not really a big deal anywhere else, which I didn’t know before now. For grade 8 graduation, you get a fancy dress that costs about $300 and there’s a dance and a ceremony and you get your hair did and there’s a limo to drop you off at the event and you get a corsage and sometimes graduation gifts too (I got a $300 typewriter from my grandparents for mine which was pretty state of the art for its time). And there’s usually a big trip at the end of your grade 8 year to either Quebec or Ottawa. I didn’t have a grade 8 trip or if there was one, I didn’t go (I forget now, I kinda think there was one and I didn’t go because I got in a lot of trouble in grade 8 and it’s quite possible that I just wasn’t allowed to go).

Anyway, Charlie’s making sure that Madison’s grade 8 graduation is spectacular because he’s a kind man and Madison is very fortunate to have him in her life.

But there’s this damn Ottawa trip coming up at the end of the month, which is fine, every Canadian should see Ottawa at some point in their lives and that’s that. I think total, the trip cost about $500 total, paid in increments throughout the year.

There was an info meeting for parents last week and the tour people said that the kids only needed about $10 spending money because everything is more or less paid for. Blake, being a cheap bastard, said that was great and declared Madison would only be getting $10 and he said this in front of Madison’s teacher and some of her classmates. When they came home from the meeting, I got him to double it.

The next morning when Madison came to school, her teacher TEASED HER for only being allowed to have $10 and has teased her several times about this, according to Madison. I guess everyone at school is talking about how much their parents are giving them to bring on the trip and some kids are getting up to $200 and some parents are just giving their kids CREDIT CARDS to bring with them and they are ALL making fun of Madison for only being allowed to bring $20 and $25 of her allowance that she’ll be getting between now and the trip. I felt bad for her so I’m taking $20 of my own money and giving it to her for her birthday to bring with her, bringing her total up to $65.

But this kid of mine…she insists on getting me a Mother’s Day gift with her own money as the kids traditionally do. I’ve told her not to and then she said she would anyway so I told her just to get me a Skor bar and I guess at one of the store sin town you can get 2 SKor bars for $1, so I told her to get that. She said that’s not enough. I argued with her but in the end I just said “it’s your money, but I don’t need anything and would rather you use the money for your trip”. So I dunno what she’s going to do.

But what pisses me off is that her whole class is making fun of her for being the poor kid and that’s breaking my fucking heart. And it’s not even so much that we’re not giving her a ton of money to spend because we can’t afford it, I mean, you guys reading this are great and if I told you this story and ended it with a plea to give Madison spending money for her trip, a lot of you would contribute, but that’s not what this is. It’s that we don’t see what she would need a ton of money for.  When the whole tour is paid for and we already paid like, $500 for the trip in the first place, what does she really need spending money for? She said to buy a t-shirt, well she has enough for a t-shirt with $65. She said to buy drinks and snacks for the bus, well she has enough with $65 for that too. She doesn’t need a whole crapload of souvenirs for a place that’s only 6 hours away. As far as I’m concerned, you only need ONE thing to remind you of your time there, not a whole bunch of things. I mean, really all Ottawa has is our government, it’s not like they’re going to Sudbury to see the nickel mines where there’s a ton of different types of minerals and shit you can buy as souvenirs or North Bay where they mine amethyst or Banff where they used to mine gold and therefore you can buy Canadian gold as a souvenir if you want to. (I have some from when my mm and I went when I was about 2.) I’m just saying that you can buy shit with Canada flags on it EVERYWHERE.

But like, these asshole kids are all bragging about how much their parents are giving them to come and they’re making fun of Madison for being the poor kid, which sucks because she’s already one of the biggest “losers” in her class so this isn’t helping her self-esteem any and I just feel really really bad for her. It breaks my fucking heart. She’s asked me a million times if she can do extra chores and stuff to earn more money to bring but we’ve got everything already covered chore-wise in her allowance (supervising Wes doing dishes, vacuuming sometimes and the bathroom).

She’s told everyone and their brother that all she wants for her birthday next week is cash to bring with her to Ottawa but I already know that everyone’s gotten her other things instead.

I don’t know what the right thing to do here is. Do we give her more money so she won’t be picked as badly on as the poor kid? (Like why are they all even talking about this stuff anyway, has no one taught these kids that it’s impolite to talk about money this way?) Literally all I can spare (from my Squam fund) is $20 extra and Blake’s pretty much tapped out too. It’s stretching it as it is for us to give her the $40 she’s getting from us. I think maybe Blake should advance her allowance a bit but at the same time, should Madison be bailed out this way? Is that good parenting or should we make her tough it out? No matter how much money we give her, she’s going to be bringing the least amount of money because the lowest person she knows of so far is bringing $150.

And I am SO ANGRY at her teacher for encouraging this shit by doing it herself. I could spit nails. I’m not sure what to do about that situation either.

So what would you guys do? I’m at a loss.

The other things that’s bothering me is Live Journal etiquette. There is someone on my friend’s list on Live Journal that drives me nuts because all they talk about is one thing. Well, I guess it’s more than one thing but it all stems from one particular issue and all I hear from this person is excuses and “poor me” crap and I realize we all have our moments but I’ve been reading (or more to the point, skipping) this person’s journal posts for a couple of years now and it’s all the same, it’s all this one track mind thing and it makes me insane. And like, this person and I, we have this same thing in common and that’s how we became LJ friends but you don’t see me posting about that and only that for years on end, even when it was a huge part of my life (and I guess it still is but there’s not much to say about it). I just wonder, does this person not have any other interests? Because it’s literally only posts about this one thing.

So I want to defriend this person so I don’t have to scroll past their entries anymore but I feel bad just cutting them off like that because I would feel bad if someone did that to me (depending on the person). But I know that even if I explained my position to this person, they would just freak out on me and list all the ways that I’m a terrible person guilty of the same thing and I don’t want to deal with that crap either. This person is very dramatic and would quite probably shit on my head because I’ve seen them do that to a whole bunch of other people who have exited their life for similar reasons.

I should also probably add that I don’t think this person is reading my entries either because they hardly ever comment in my journal. I definitely comment in theirs more often than vice versa. And to be clear, I have zero animosity toward this person and I think they feel the same way about me, it’s just that I don’t feel we have very much in common anymore and it really bothers me to see them in the same place in their lives as they were, with like, no growth whatsoever (as far as what they post on LJ) and no mention of anything outside of the same one or two issues, for about 3 years. It’s extremely frustrating to me, especially knowing that if I made any attempt to help them get out of their rut (so to speak), it would either fall on deaf ears or may actually be met with hostility and excuses.

So how do I break ties with this person amicably? What’s the protocol here? My first instinct was to fake an LJ friends cut and say that I cut a whole bunch of people when really, I only cut this one person, but that’s just not honest and I don’t think I would feel good about that.

And of course now that I’ve posted this, if I do cut this person, they’re going to know I was talking about them. I keep thinking that if it were me, I would want to just be cut and then if the cut bothered me, I would contact the person to find out why. In fact, I did that very thing about a month ago when a friend cut me and I was curious as to what I did to offend them that deeply so I e-mailed them and as it turned out it was a mistake and they refriended me.

I dunno…I’m just not good at this. You’d think I would be after all these years, but I’m not. The only time I’ve ever done a friends cut was when there was a security breech and chances are, I didn’t cut the person behind that anyway so reacting to it was probably pointless and I probably offended a lot of people. :o/

Oh and the reason this is even an issue at all is because Live Journal e-mails you now to say that someone’s defriended you so if/when I do it, they’ll be notified. When I get the notification that someone’s defriended me (and I don’t really know who the person is to begin with), I just automatically defriend them back and that’s that, no questions asked, but I really do think this person will take it personally (and I guess it sort of IS personal) and react negatively and I really really don’t want that.

At the same time, they’re probably not even reading this post because they don’t seem to read my posts anyway so…I dunno.

Thoughts?

I have a staff meeting in about 40 minutes so hopefully I can get through the rest of this post before that (keeping in mind that when I make a post, I have to also cross-post it to Camwhores, which is a whole annoying thing THAT SHOULDN’T BE ANNOYING but it is because the forum there messes up my formatting because it’s buggy as FUCK and it takes me 10 more minutes to post anything over there).

The other thing weighing on me is that I’ve still only made it to Heritage Park the one time. I walked there in the cold and I stayed there for about 10 minutes and then I walked home. Blake bribed me with an apple danish from the bakery.

I never made my agoraphobia sticks. The idea seems really stupid now. And I even bought more sticks (well, Blake did) to do it.

I’ve been trying to read a little bit of Mind Over Mood every night (that’s a cognitive behavioural therapy workbook) but it’s really difficult and I don’t feel like I’m retaining any of the information. I didn’t think it would be this slow. It’s also really dry material too so I can’t really sit down and like, read it because I don’t want to. It’s boring. They try not to make it boring and for the most part I guess it’s actually pretty good but I just can’t get in the mood to read ANYTHING right now, not even the two books I just bought from Amazon (The Bloggess’ memoir that I forget the name of and I’m not liking and Bossypants by Tina Fey). I just can’t seem to do anything these days but fuck around on the internet and wait around emergency rooms. Like right now I feel totally guilty for not working on the painting I started a few days ago and have pretty much abandoned.

I’m straying from my point: cognitive behavioural therapy is HARD, especially when you’re trying to do it by yourself. I’m just not convinced this book is going to help me and therefore I kinda feel like it’s a waste of my time. Annd I’m only even on the second chapter.

I think what I need to do is actually sit down and read the damn thing, make a concerted effort, but that just seems like such a huge boring waste of time to me that I can’t seem to do it. I wish it was like, classes on video that I could listen to while I paint. I learn the best way doing that. By listening. I used to be good with “book learnin’” but I just don’t have the patience for it anymore it seems. So how do I remedy that? How do I sit down and read this fucking book and retain the knowledge within? Because I need to read this book and I need to make myself better. I almost fucking died. Life is too short to be lived within these 4 walls. I need *experiences*, I need to GROW or I’ll be like the person I want to defriend and only post about the same 2 or 3 things all the time! I agree with Mena Suvari’s character in the movie American Beauty: nothing is worse than being boring and I am at risk, if not already there.

So I need to fix that. Maybe I need Ritalin or something. I think I see my shrink next week so maybe I’ll ask her about that. What’s one more pill?

So that’s what’s on my mind today. That’s what’s bothering me. If you can help, that’s great, if not? Thanks for listening anyway. Sometimes it’s just nice to feel like you’ve been heard.

So my pseudocysts are not infected, which is what Dr. Hanrahan was worried about and my “amylase” (pancreatic juice blood stuff) was down to 62 and “normal” is between 30-110 U/L (which I guess is units by litre?) Yesterday it was 157. I guess that’s what a “pancreas attack” looks like as far as blood work.

The nurses were evil vampires from hell. They missed my veins a whole bunch of times so they poked me like literally 15 times in 3 different places. I was VERY brave though and didn’t cry. I wanted to. I cried a little once they left the room. But THEY DIDN’T BREAK ME. (It was 2 separate nurses even! WTF!)

So that’s what happened. Oh and my creatinine is 112 (normal is 46-92). That’s my kidney function. I have to look it up because I forget what it was last time, but I think that’s lower than before, which is good. Especially since today I wasn’t doing the best diet-wise. (Fritos for breakfast, McDonald’s hamburger and pretzels for lunch…doot doot doo…I swear I don’t eat like that all the time…) Urea was 8.8 (normal is 2.5-6.1 and I think that has something to do with the kidneys as well).

The doctor said my liver enzymes were high but I don’t know what those are on the test (I got a print out to take to Dr. Hanrahan when I see her next) and she said that’s probably normal for me because it was similar to yesterday’s test. My glucose was 7.6 (normal is 4.2-6.1) which has me a little worried because the pancreas, of course, is in charge of insulin and I didn’t really have anything sugary to eat today. I hadn’t even had more than 3 sips of diet Coke before the test (not sure if that raises blood sugar or not, I’m guessing not).

I don’t really know what the rest of the stuff on the test is so I won’t bother listing it all. The point is that my pancreas blood juice was well within the normal range, so that’s a very good thing. I am 100% totally fine (aside from the stuff that’s not fine, like my ugly, gross, herniated abdomen).

Our Nielsen scanner came yesterday! I’d totally forgotten with all the rush of stuff we did yesterday and all the sleeping I did because the morphine knocked me the fuck out! While Madison makes us dinner (we got garlic bread and red velvet cupcakes too because I am ONE YEAR SMOKE FUCKING FREE, PEOPLE! we are celebrating!) I’m going to download the software for it and set it all up and then teach everyone how to use it. From the looks of the booklet, it’s pretty straight forward.

I started working on a new girl yesterday while we started season 5 of Doctor Who. She’s going to have brown hair, brown eyes and a yellow and white dress. Her background is going to be yellow gold, cream and light yellow. And it’s going to have white, glittered daisies with orange centers! It is going to be a masterpiece! As for Doctor Who, I don’t think I like the new Doctor (11) and I really don’t think I care for Amy Pond. She’s cute and pretty, so I guess that’s a plus, and granted, I’ve only seen two episodes with her, (and him) but I’m not really liking the duo to be perfectly honest. I find him to be kind of a dick and not in an endearing way. I dunno, I’ll give it a fair shake and I like the show obviously so I’ll keep watching, maybe they get better, but those are my initial thoughts. I do find it interesting, as Blake pointed out, that with the episodes we’ve seen (maybe we saw 3, I forget), she’s “saved the day” each time. Not him.

So we’ll see.

Also as a present for being Smoke Free For An Entire Year Blake got me this month’s Martha Stewart magazine and on the front it has yellow and orange swirled meringue cookies! I LOVE MERINGUE COOKIES AND I LOVE YELLOW! So maybe I can get Madison to make those for me before it gets humid and you can’t make them anymore (because they’ll burn – it’s like, chemistry). The magazine also promises to give me party tips, so I could definitely use those since we’re having a party in July.

Anyway, I think that’s all I have to say. I’m kind of fucking starving so I think it’s time to get this dinner thing on the go. Toodles!

PS. We did a cache at the hospital! It was inside one of the lights in the parking lot! Also our Sketchbook Project sketchbooks came yesterday too, so starting this weekend, me and the kids are going to start working on them! AND Blake and Wes got their 4 x 6 Exchange pieces of art yesterday too but I’m not going to post them until we all get them!  They were both pretty cool though! EXCLAMATION POINT!

PPS. It’s Madison’s 14th birthday in 10 days! If anyone planned on getting her anything, her wishlist is here!

This is me at the hospital on morphine:

They did blood work and a CAT scan.
This is me having a CAT scan:

I had to drink 4 cups of dye (so gross) and then they injected me with more dye that makes you feel all crazy warm and like you have to pee.

Here’s the verdict:

1) My pseudocysts are smaller. This is good news. I don’t know how MUCH smaller, but smaller is good.. Smaller means I can have surgery sooner.

2. My “amylase” levels are higher than they would like to see. From what I understand, “amylase” is like, pancreatic juice in your blood or something and higher levels could indicate pancreatitis. Normal levels are like, 110. My levels were 157. I have to go back to the hospital tomorrow after work and have blood work to check these levels again.

So they don’t know why I’m in pain or why my “amylase” level is too high though. That worries me.

Anyway, that’s what happened. We’re home now. I’m going to go have a nap then eat ice cream and watch Doctor Who while I work on the girl I started drawing yesterday.

(Click to embiggen)

You can’t see it in the scan because it got cut off, but he lost points for the sunflower not having roots. The potato mine CLEARLY has labeled roots, so obviously his teacher is just unable to recognize genius when it slaps her in the face.

So yeah. That’s Wes. :o)

Thank you SO much to everyone who tried to help us. It is greatly appreciated! Now if only I could figure out the whole depression thing… :o/ Baby steps.

Last week, because he’s amazing, my friend Charlie got Wes an Xbox 360 with Kinect and Star Wars (plus the Xbox came with 2 games). This is the package we got, along with Kinectimals and Star Wars Kinect. He says he can’t save on any of the games.

On that Amazon page, it says: “The spacious 250GB hard drive gives you the space you need to store arcade games, movies, demos, and even full Xbox 360 games.” and “Xbox 360 250GB Hard Drive: The internal 250GB hard drive allows you to save your games…” but Wes and Blake can’t figure out how to save games and Wes says that’s one of the things adding to his depression. Does anyone know what might be going on? He can’t seem to save any game. My friend Katie says they should autosave but Wes says they’re not.

I made Wes give me 5 things he’s grateful for today and we started a gratitude journal. Every day after school I’m going to make him do this with me. I *get* depression. I’ve been depressed a large majority of my life and only with medication has my life quality improved HOWEVER through it all, I have always acknowledged my gratitude and especially in someone as young as him I think it’s EXTREMELY important that he be GRATEFUL that he has an Xbox 360 (and geocaching, a house, trees, his family, food and water – which are all the things he listed for me today after school) and all of the things that make him fortunate in this life and have those things be completely separate from MOOD. Being depressed is NO EXCUSE (pardon me for all these caps, but I think it’s important) to be UNGRATEFUL and if he’s going to use grown up words like “depressed” (which I believe is an accurate word for his mood), he’s old enough to TRULY understand GRATITUDE and PRIVILEGE.

Now that I’ve said all that, is anyone an Xbox expert? All I had within my power to change his day was to let him have a peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich and to start a gratitude journal. I do not speak Xbox. I found THIS on Google but we have a 250GB hard drive, so how can that be? HELP.

I. PAINT. GIRLS.

I wrote this, in BIG FUCKING LETTERS, in gel pen, in my sketchbook on May 1st while watching Toddlers & Tiaras with Madison.  And I wrote it because while I was watching the show, I realized two things:

1) I like Toddlers & Tiaras because the dresses and costumes the girls wear inspire me because it’s ultimate “dress up play” and because these girls (their ages, anyway) are who I want to have my paintings on their walls. I tried to stuff that deep down inside myself so I could be a “real artist” but honestly, that made me miserable so…

2) I really truly love painting my girls. That’s what makes me happy. I really truly paint my girls with little girls in mind, that’s not a schtick or a marketing tactic, that’s the god’s honest truth. If grown ups like them too, that’s great! That makes me happy too! But that’s not who I’m thinking of when I’m making them.

When I was painting “Menarche” and “Me, too.”, I felt empty inside because when I was painting them, I wasn’t painting them with anyone in mind and I just don’t function that way and I think those paintings reflect that. When I look at them, I dunno, I just feel nothing. When I look at my girls, I feel proud that I made them. Anyone can paint a giant sparkly uterus, anyone can. But not anyone can make one of my girls. Only I can do that. I mean, they’re simple, but anyone trying to copy them would obviously be a copy. Don’t get me wrong, I like “Menarche” and I like “Me, too.” and they were good experiments but the result of those experiments was that I paint girls. Simple as that. And I like working big, so I’m going to try and figure out a way to combine those two things.

So as I was thinking all this stuff, and here’s the part Blake hates, I got an e-mail. “Sold! Your Zazzle product(s) have been purchased” was the subject line. Oh yeah? I thought. I’d kinda forgotten that I even opened a Zazzle shop because I never really promoted it since I couldn’t afford to test the merchandise (well, I got postage stamps and they looked amazing so I assume everything else is amazing too). Well I opened the e-mail and not only had someone made a purchase, someone had purchased the most expensive thing in my Zazzle shop: an iPhone case for $42.50.

I’m sorry but that’s a sign from the Universe. That’s Universe with a capital “U”. And I’m also sorry to say that when the Universe smacks you in the face that hard, you fucking listen. Yeah, it could be coincidence, but it’s a triple coincidence and even if it didn’t come from the Universe, that’s pretty lucky…although I suppose “luck” is just as dumb to believe in as signs from the Universe but I don’t care.

I had a lot of fun setting up my Zazzle shop. I’m proud of it. The mere idea that someone in this world, who I don’t even know, liked my Brown Bee Girl iPhone case so much that she paid a lot of money for it and she’s walking around with it as I type this. Like out in the world. That’s just crazy to me. When I got the e-mail, I figured my friend Jax had finally got her iPhone because she said that when she did, she was going to get that same case, but it wasn’t her because I asked. So I did some investigating, not knowing how Zazzle worked, and they give you a first name and a town and state. And I don’t know this person. This was not a pity sale. This was a legitimate sale from a person who liked my work. And that makes me feel good. You can’t put a big sparkly uterus on an iPhone case (well you could, but it would look stupid) but my girls look GREAT on everything I made. The idea that someone might send a mermaid postcard to a friend across the world makes me so happy, you have no idea. The idea, that someone might send a mermaid postcard to a friend across the world with a “Tiki Girl” postage stamp literally gives me goosebumps. (Note that my mermaids aren’t on postage stamps. Zazzle and the United States Postal Service dubbed them “too risque” for postage stamps because they have jeweled boobies.) Or a “Strawberry Ice Cream” poster in a little girl’s room. THAT makes me crazy happy because as I was making all this Zazzle “stuff”, all I could think about was how awesome it was that I could make this kinda stuff with my girls, that way people could afford to buy them, I could put my work in the hands of more than one person, and I could keep my originals if I wanted to, like in the case of “Brown Bee Girl” who I painted for myself (and is my favourite painting to date).

I dunno. I know everyone was excited that I said I was going to be painting other things from now on and I feel like I’m letting people down but this is where my heart is. When I go to Michael’s, all I can see is stuff that would be good for girls. It’s like I have tunnel vision. Even after I said that I was going to be painting other things, I kept buying stuff that would be good for girls, it’s like fucking compulsive or something.

Now, having said all that, I think I’m going to step up my game a bit. I can do better. That’s another thing I learned from this experiment. I CAN DO BETTER. I’m not totally sure what that means myself, but I think it means that I’m going to be spending more time on each girl. Maybe putting them in different settings or backgrounds. Maybe making actual people and not just abstract “pretty girls” (like Blake, which I’m still going to do one of these days or myself or Madison [I already did Wes] or maybe I’ll finally get around to doing my own Frida Khalo [not]). And with each painting I do, there will be coordinating Zazzle products so I can reach more people, if they want.

So that’s what I want to do. And I’m sorry if that lets people down but I have to be true to myself as much as I loathe to say that because it sounds so Oprah.

Anyway, in other news, I woke up this morning with pink, eyes full of pus and it’s now noon-thirty and they’re still pink and itchy so I think it’s safe to say that I have fucking pink eye. No idea where I picked that up but I guess I’ll e-mail Blake and ask him to bring home Polysporin eye drops after work. Ugh I hate eye drops. They make me cringe so hardcore. HATE THEM.

I worked on Saturday and while I did, Blake and the kids (and Alex and Ronny) went to Free Comic Book Day and then Blake and the kids went to see The Avengers. When they came home, I asked Blake if we could go to Utopia on Sunday to finish up doing the caches in the Tiffin Conservation Area because they’re all really elaborate and cool and 4 of them are letterboxes and we just bought a brand new, turquoise stamp pad. I wanted to revisit Wonderball and get a good stamp from it rather than the half-assed job I got using a Sharpie. (To recap: a letterbox cache is one that has a stamp in it that stays in the cache and you collect these stamps’ imprints in a special book made for them. I’m just using a sketchbook.)

So he said yes and I texted Ronny and Alex and asked if they wanted to come but they were at a birthday party so I didn’t get an answer right away but in the end it was a “yes” so all Sunday afternoon and evening, Blake worked on charting our route and solving all the puzzles involved in doing the whole conservation area, which took a really long time because it’s not just a simple thing and while he did that, I worked on getting together our Canadian travel bug with the USB key. On it I put 2 pictures of each of us, a pic of the dogs and the cat (all in one folder labeled “Crittenden” and the file names are like, “01.Sunnybananas.Canada.jpg) and then an instruction PDF with the bug’s mission, which is to visit as many strangely named places as possible and to collect the pics of those who encounter it on its USB key and in the bug’s gallery. Blake came up with the name for the bug. It’s called “The Great Canadian Strange Faces/Strange Places Travel Bug”. Then I had to activate it and make the page for it, which I did really quickly but I’m going to get Blake to try and make it better with html. We didn’t get finished until about 1am.

So then we went to sleep and set the alarm for 9:30am. At around 9am I think, Ronny texted Blake and said that they couldn’t come (he hurt his back a while ago and he’s still sore and geocaching is srs bsns) so we got up anyway and decided that we’d save Utopia for when they could come and insted Blake and I would go around and do all of the Elmvale ones that he and the kids had done while I was working on Saturdays.

I know I’ve mentioned it before but the Trans-Canada Trail goes right through our town and half of it starts right near our house, like within walking distance, so we did that first and that was like, at least 7 caches and I dunno, 3 or 4 thousand miles? (Okay, Blake says it was only 2.) Then we went to Heritage Park to do “No Flow” which is a very tricksy cache but Blake told me where it was a long time ago when they first did it so I knew where to look except we couldn’t do it because there were muggles milling about so we went and looked for the one by the school but that was a bust because it either wasn’t there anymore or we couldn’t find it, then we went and did one near Tim Hortons which was in a culvert and it was a big Tim Hortons travel mug and then we did a whole series of them along side roads and one down another part of the Trans-Canada Trail.

Here’s a picture of me doing a modified tree pose in a tree as I was putting a log back in its cache:

I’m wearing my Central Ontario Geocachers shirt and a hat because my hair (or lack thereof) was terrible.

And then we came home! I now have 24 caches under my belt and 9 travel bugs!

Yesterday it was super hot and sunny out but with a nice breeze and we were pretty sweaty and disgusting when we got home so I thought it would probably be a good idea to have a shower, which I can’t do too often because of my wound, but it was bleeding through my Mesorb pad when we got home so off it came and we assessed the damage. Pretty severe. :o/ Lots of breaking down of the tissue and it was just a mess. So I cried a little bit because it’s my body BREAKING DOWN and BLEEDING and it’s NEVER GOING TO FUCKING HEAL but then I put on my big girl panties, sucked it up, had a long shower and then Blake redressed the wound when I got out.

Cheryl (my nurse) was here today and she wasn’t happy with the breakdown but there’s nothing we can do about it and it’s just going to get worse as the weather gets hotter and I naturally sweat, especially since I have to wear my binder (which we washed yesterday for the first time because it was soaked with sweat and when it came out of the dryer, it looked brand new so at least we don’t have to buy a new one of those like we first though and that’s $100 we can spend on something else). This time she dressed it with the Betadine, then let that dry, then the Inadine which is like a little patch of antimicrobial stuff like Betadine (sort of like Iodine), and then a whole bunch of 4 x 4 inch gauze patches with the idea of allowing it to breathe. Then she stuck it all together with cloth tape and we put my binder on, hoping for the best.

She sees Sylvia, the wound specialist, this week and she’s going to ask her if there’s anything else we can do. She doesn’t think there is though. The only solution is to finally have my surgery and cut the bad bits out but we still don’t know what’s going on with those pseudocysts and I’m still having pancreas pain which worries the shit out of me. My surgeon doesn’t want to give me another CAT scan to see what’s happening with the pseudocysts because she doesn’t want to expose me to any more radiation right now  since I’ve had a million scans already over the last year. (Can you believe it’s almost been a year since this nightmare started? June 23rd.)

This wound is never going to heal though and is only going to get worse as the months get hotter so I think something needs to be done sooner rather than later. We see the surgeon again in another week and a half I think.

Okay well, it’s my day off so I’m going to finish my lunch, watch Oprah’s Lifeclass (it’s the one we saw in person that I was barely paying attention to…) or a movie or something and start working on a new painting. Have a lovely day!

They’re all super low-res though and I think that makes a difference when printing right? But they’d be actual size (good ol’ 320 x 240px, but double that in later years) so I don’t see why that would be a problem. I dunno, it’s just an idea I’m tossing around. I think I kinda like it though, I mean, I have these archives, I might as well use them. Plus they’re all watermarked with Camwhores.com on them (well, most) so that’s advertising for the site and I doubt very much that Kevin would mind me using them (I realize they’re my pictures, but once they hit Camwhores’ servers and the watermark is added, they technically own them too I think).

I used to be so pretty. :o/

That’s just what I’ve been thinking about this morning. That and being really really sick with this cold or flu from hell. I woke up from my nap this morning and realized that we got Advil Cold & Sinus in the US last year when we were there for Blake’s grandmother’s funeral and we never opened it so I just spent the last half hour tearing this house apart trying to find it. I finally found it…in the medicine cabinet. (In my defense it was on the top shelf and I’m very short.) I was SO happy to have found it and popped one immediately. It’s not really doing anything though so I think I’m going to have another one. The box says I can do that so…

Today is my long workday. I work from 2pm EST – 11pm EST and I’m dreading it today because I feel like shit and just wanna go back to bed. BUT it’s like, the easiest job in the world (okay not really…some aspects of it are hard) and I can do any and all kinds of internet things while working so it’s not all bad. And I can listen to music as loud as I want to because Blake and the kids are at the comic book store for Free Comic Book Day and then I think they’re going to see The Avengers afterward at the cheap theatre in Barrie. ($4 matinees!) Then, hopefully, they’re bringing me home beef teriyaki for lunch. Blake already went to the bakery this morning and got me a homemade apple danish so I might be pushing it with the teriyaki request…

Last night was the Central Ontario Geocachers event at Moose Winooskis. The lady who co-ordinated and ran the event was named Paprika819 (Pat) and I really liked her a lot.

When we got there, Paprika handed us a sheet of paper with stuff on it and pens and when I looked at it I was like, “oh no” because it was one of those “get to know you” games where it has clues down one side of the sheet like, “- are the newest female members on 03/25/2012, 2 to be found” and then you have to go around asking people who that person is and then you write their name down beside the clue and their real name in the column beside their geoname. (I was the answer to that question, along with a girl named Jen – we joined on the same day).

So we were casually filling it out with the people at our table and then Paprika told us there was a prize for whoever handed her a completed sheet first and the prize was a Travel Bug so I was like, “go get ‘em, Tiger!” and Blake was off like a prom dress, asking people about the clues. He ended up winning and Paprika gave him a Travel Bug in the shape of a rook.

When that was finished, we all had dinner. Blake just had a burger and fries and I had this cheesy chicken meal that was actually pretty fucking gross. There was garlic bread with cheese, fettuccine with a cheese sauce and then breaded chicken filled with cheese. It sounded good on the menu but it was just WAY too much cheese. I think if I ever go there again, I’ll just get chicken fingers. My go-to meal at places like that are clubhouse sandwiches but theirs had HAM on it, as well as bacon and turkey and that’s gross so I couldn’t get that. I also had a strawberry daiquiri and a diet Coke.

As dinner was finishing up, a lady named Nawty was selling C.O.G. t-shirts for $12 and I’d brought money to buy one if I liked them, which I did, so I got a red one in XL, figuring Blake could wear it too if he wanted to. They were sold out of kids sizes in red and I didn’t like the blue so I didn’t get Wes one but there’s a mega event in June in Midland (that I can’t go to because I have to work :o() so maybe we can get him a shirt there. At that event, there are also going to be trackable C.O.G. geocoins for sale and I want to get one. I think they’re $18 though. That’s a lot of Sunny money. Especially for something you essentially give away and let loose into the world.

Anyway…here’s the shirt:

After dinner Paprika started doing draws for prizes and I won ANOTHER Canadian Travel Bug! So that’s THREE Travel Bugs we have in this house right now with no destination! We have a vague idea as to what I want to do with the first one I bought (the USB idea/funny named places) but we haven’t brainstormed what  to do with the others yet. In the draw, Blake won a container to be used as a cache. It’s long and skinny and it came with a log in a plastic bag. Now he’s itching to place his first cache. :o)

I think everyone won a prize.

Oh yeah, and before we went into the restaurant, we scoured the parking lot for Travel Bugs on cars and we found 7 of them! We had to park in the back though so I don’t think anyone logged ours. In fact, I know no one logged ours because I didn’t get any e-mails saying that they did. Bummer.

The guy who was sitting beside me and the lady sitting in front of me took pictures of our geopatches on our bags though and they should be logging them when they have a chance.

I’d say there were about 26 or 28 people at the event. There was a local theatre group performing The Full Monty after dinner and one of the cachers was in it so a lot of people were going to that but we had no interest so we just went to the dinner. It’s a good excuse to get out of the house and meet new people and try new things I think.

There didn’t seem to be a lot of casual cachers at the event. The lady across from me, CocoD “lives in Barrie and stayed up until 4:30am for the April 1st Mystery Event” which was apparently like a “whodunnit” murder mystery thing they did. That’s hardcore. Another person (I don’t know who because my sheet’s not totally filled out and Paprika kept Blake’s) has *27* webcam caches. A webcam cache is when you go find the cache but there’s a webcam watching the spot it’s in so you have to have a 3rd party take a screencap of you finding the cache for you to be able to successfully log it. Those interest the hell out of me and I really wish Blake would have gotten his sheet back from Paprika so we knew who that was and we could find all of those caches. I mean, hello, webcams are kinda one of my *things*…

Does anyone know off the top of their heads if you can take a screencap with an iPad? And if so, how do you do it? Because if we could do that then we wouldn’t need a 3rd party to stay home and wait for us to call for them to screencap the cache. We could do it ourselves and then all of us Crittendens and all of the Thomassons (Ronny & Alex) could do it together.

I *think* tomorrow we’re going geocaching but I’m not sure. I want to go back to Wonderball now that we have an actual stamp pad (aqua!) and get a GOOD stamp in the sketchbook I made just for letterbox stamps and while we’re there, there’s a cache we skipped called “ROY G. BIV” that I also think is a letterbox which I think we should do. At the same time, there are like, at least 25 caches in Elmvale that I haven’t gotten to yet so we need to designate a day to do those loo, so I can log them. I think we should save those for a buggy day though because there will be less bugs in Elmvale than in the Tiffin Conservation Area which is where Wonderball, Don’t Cut the Red Wire and ROY G. BIV are. All 3 are ones that were placed for Spring Fling events by C.O.G. and of course they’ll be placing another big one in June for the Spring Fling event  too and it’ll be elaborate but we have no idea where they might place it.

So that was last night. I’m not sure when the next event is going to be but I had a good time and I’m looking forward to going to more events like that and getting to know some of these people. They’re all REALLY REALLY nerdy and outdoorsy – prerequisites for this kind of thing obviously – but then again, I guess so are we. Strangely, my anxiety at the restaurant was at like, a 4 out of 10. I was confident with the waitstaff (which I never am), I was friendly with the people around me, I just wasn’t getting up and schmoozing around the room like Blake was because he’s this extroverted social asshole butterfly.  (I love that about him and wish I could be more like that. I used to be more like that…) It was a good time.

I ordered us this fancy schmancy bug spray yesterday that apparently smells really nice and actually works. It was recommended by the ladies who go to Squam so I figure it must be good. That and a good sunscreen is all we need for a whole summer of caching on Sundays. :o) BRING IT ON.

And that’s all I have to say. Happy Saturday!