Bloody fun times

I seem to alternate off and on for good blood donations and bad blood donations.


As many of you know, I have O neg blood, the universal donor type, and thus the Red Cross is always on my back about donating. Seeing as my area was in an emergency state regarding blood supply shortages, I thought I'd go ahead and give. All was going well and I was complimenting myself on a good donation when came the time where they put that little capsule in the tube to get the last bit of blood for testing. Well, as I was told later by the donation people, the new manufacturing of these little test tube parts have been somewhat faulty, so he stuck it in the tube, and suddenly the end broke off inside of the test tube. Blood shot EVERYWHERE. All over the guy, all over my hand, all over the floor.

It didn't hurt at all, and in fact all I felt was the warm rush of blood over my hand, but I could see the girl sitting across from me in her mid-donation process get a horrified look on her face, so I started to laugh heartily to cast it off as no big deal, so she wouldn't freak out.

And it wasn't a big deal, but I knew I was going to have a reaction. See, they had to clamp up the tube so blood would stop shooting out, so that backed up and put a lot of pressure in my arm, which was uncomfortable. Then they had to pull the old test tube out in order to stick a new one in, lest my donation be totally wasted, so when they did that, blood shot out everywhere again, and going from backed up to gushing out did a number on me.

Some ice cold paper towels, orange joice, elevated feet, and several fig newtons later, all was well, but I certainly was reduced to a zombie-like state for the rest of the day. Next donation I'm going to start doing apherisis, sure it takes longer, but that way I won't have any more zombie days.


Today, Carleton and I went to the Louisville Science Center, where I used to volunteer in high school (it was awesome fun). Julie, my old volunteer coordinator boss person, was still there and delighted to see me. We caught up and stuff and things seem to be going very well in the program, it was nice to see her again.

We also went to the Frazier Historical Arms Museum which was pretty freakin cool. When I was on my England trip a couple of years ago we went to the Royal Armory in Leeds, and I thought it was awesome, and some stuff from there was donated to this museum. Swords and armor are fun and cool, but we were too hungry to stick around for the sword fighting demonstration.

Caught up with Brendan tonight, seems that crew had an awesome time at Comic-con, according to Brendan's account. I'll have several copies of our ashcan comic, Honor, to hand out at Conglomeration. Making that comic was fun, and I'd like to do it again next year (only this time, start planning it NOW, so I can actually have a decent story and not so rushed drawings).

My boyfriend is teh awesome

So last night at around 10:00 the doorbell rang, much to my bewilderment. I went to answer it and who should stand there but Carleton, who I was not expecting to even be able to come down until later on in the week. The sneak drove down to surprise me, I love him!

In other news....well, there is none, hehe!

Postcards and Pupils

You'd think that postcards would be one of those things that's easy to find. Not so. I scraped all over the city looking for a place that sold Louisville-themed postcards for the activity, and after I finally got a lead from one of my Kempo friends, I had to go to the evil Hawley-Cooke-eating Borders to get some. Got them all sent out today, though, was fun.

I'm taking a break from working on my Comic-con contribution. I think I'll manage to get it finished on time, but yikes do my wrists hurt.

Eye appointment today, I'm really excited. I know that sounds lame, but my eyesight has deteriorated quite a bit since my last examination, and getting new glasses is always an incredible experience. I can't wait to be able to see the leaves on the trees!!

In other news, it was estimated that 100,000 houses in Louisville were without power after the storm on Tuesday (not me!). The meteorologists get so excited about tornados, but when these straight-wind storms come through, they are much more mellow, in spite of the damage being much more extensive.

Oh well, if any Louisville-peeps are without power, you can come over to my house to eat hot food or do laundry!

Dream

I usually don't write about dreams but, eh, it was an interesting, thought-provoking one.



So first, some background. I'll let you know when I get to the dream, but this part is actually real.

When I was little, my grandma lived next door to some people who had a wolf hybrid. I was too young to understand what the word "hybrid" meant, so when visiting I'd often ask to be taken over to visit "The Wolf." (who had a name, I just could never recall it). The people kept him in a pen in their backyard. I don't recall them ever letting him out of the pen, because they were in a fairly urban area. But I was way too little to formulate any opinions or coherent thoughts about proper facilities and care for wolf hybrids.

Anyway, I would go over and stand at the door of the pen, and I remember The Wolf being really really big, like almost as tall as me, and very very calm. And he would come over to the door and look at me, and I would look at him, and I would hold up my hand and he would sniff it a little, and then look at me some more. I remember his eyes being really intelligent and sad, and thinking "wow, must be a bummer to have to stay in a pen all the time, even Bruno (my grandma's dog) gets let out of his pen to run around the yard a bit." It made me feel very small that I was unable to do anything about it. Anyway, on my visits with The Wolf, I would pretend to have conversations with it and such.

But that was a long time ago, and I actually had never thought about it up to now, because....

(this is where the dream starts)

I dreamt about The Wolf last night. I can't recall if I was a little kid in my dream or the way I am now, probably somewhere in between. Realizing that I hadn't even *thought* about the Wolf until that instant, I said "Oh! I remember you!" And he looked at me the same way he had when I was little, intelligent and sad, and I felt the same way, small and unable to do anything. I don't recall that The Wolf was in his pen, though.

That's all it was, very simple, but kind of fascinating to me to dredge up an old memory of The Wolf (who was probably almost entirely dog, but hey, he was a wolf in my little-kid mind). Thoughts thoughts thoughts

Ponderings

Point of order #1: Things that were really funny when they happened that I totally forgot about and then was suddenly reminded of. Specifically, "Science is so cool, we're replacing the word 'cool' with 'science'!" I'm going to miss going to SETC with the Centre kids next year.

Point of order #2: And I apologize in advance for this, but, I MISS MY BOYFRIEND *sob*

Point of order #3: Artstuffs, selling artstuffs, and commissions. So far I've only ever done 2 commissions (3 if you count the T-shirt design I did for CentrePeace), both special cases for one person, who was a friend, which helped in working out how to go about doing a commission. I'm half-wondering if it'd be a good idea to take commissions now and again. I know the basic "bewares", such as not taking on a bunch at the same time and getting burnt out, and getting payment things worked out and such. I dunno if I should do commission auctions, or just have flat rates for particular mediums, or what. I've done pretty well auctioning off the occasional piece of glass on ebay, and this year will be the first year at Conglomeration that I have 2D art so we'll see how that goes. Just pondering over whether it'd be a worthwhile thing to try out or not.

Saw Spiderman 2...

DOC OCK ROCKS MY SOCKS OFF!!!!!!!!!! (try and say that 5 times fast)

Oh, and puppets will rule the world.

If I had 4 bionic arms, I would use them for good, I promise (or maybe I would use them for awesome)

Pre-holiday weekend cleaning

I bought the Triplettes of Belville yesterday on a whim, I think everyone is entitled to an impulse buy now and again.

This weekend we (my family) are going over to Virginia to help my aunt move into her new home. Her husband is in the army, so they and my two cousins have played the move-everywhere-across-the-world game for quite some time now, starting out in Germany, then New York, then Houston, then back to Germany again. They are finally finished and coming back to the States for good now, much to everyone's excitement (the entirety of my mom's side of the family lives here in Louisville, so it's been somewhat of a strain on them to have a family member so far away all the time. Granted, Virginia isn't exactly down the street, but it's closest so far!).

My mom went up there with my aunt earlier this week to help paint, so today I am clean clean cleaning so that when we come back my mom won't freak out at how dirty I let the house get, hehe! It's also for myself, though. As much as I hate to admit it, the dirtier and more cluttered my room gets, the less inspired I am to do work. My work on my puppet and new painting have dwindled this week because of how much stuff is strewn across my room. I guess it's not a terrible thing, at least it will inspire me to clean a bit more often.

Whenever my room is freshly cleaned I am inspired not only to work on current projects, but to start like 10 new ones (I suppose it's some entropy-driven urge to dirty up the room again). Maybe next week I'll start building another mask to sell at the con, or maybe some little sculpey dragons.

I really hope I can finish this new painting I started for Conglomeration, because I think it will be a nice one. We'll see, I guess.