Happy Canada Day, everyone!

Last night I found out that my grandma fell down a flight of stairs the other day and broke both her wrists.

This is the same grandma who had a knee replacement a few years go, as well as toe-joint replacements (and unrelated, a mastectomy due to breast cancer), so she walks with two canes. Now she can’t hold her canes, ’cause her wrists are broken.

They don’t have casts on yet, because they are still too swollen to put them on. I didn’t know they waited for swelling to go down before putting casts on. Apparently she should have those “soon”.

Does anyone have any good diabetic-friendly casserole recipes? I’d love to bring some food, since not only can she not cook she can’t even feed herself, so I thought it might make things easier on my grandpa to not have to cook all the time as well as take care of her.

Now I’m going to totally steal cavaticat‘s idea and provide a visual for anyone wanting to send any well-wishes or good thoughts her way: 930

Ok, so it’s a known fact I’m a giant nerd.

But why, oh why, can’t I be one of those giant nerds with more money than they know what to do with?

Seriously, universe, where’s all my money?

I wasn’t one of those people who spent $80 every weekend on beer and cigarettes all through college.

I don’t have a tricked-out car.

If those people spent all my money I’ll be pissed.

I’m looking for a new multi-domain webhost, as mine had a security breech last week, and a few of my sites (same account, same server) got hacked.
If I’m going to spend the time to rebuild them (even sloppily and quickly), I may as well switch to a new host that uses cPanel, because I like cPanel and DreamHost doesn’t use it.

I basically used DH as my catch-all host; anything that was not my business or my blog was hosted there, as it allowed unlimited domains to be hosted. I currently have 7 domains, but one was going to be trashed anyway (since I have no use for caitlin-brown.com anymore). Two of the remaining 6 are really just placeholder domains. Someday, maybe far in the future, maybe I’ll have time and energy to turn them into something useful. :p

If anyone has any suggestions for a new host, I’d love to hear them! Preferably I’d like to stay under $10/mo, since that’s on top of the money I pay for hosting my business and blog (but those hosts don’t allow so many domains without going to the much-too-large and too-expensive packages) and it’s not like they were bringing in any money.

Also, with the NegaStone down for so long, where will I get my daily NSFW fix??

[singsong]
I have a dress form! I have a dress form!

[/singsong]

I was at the mall today renewing my license plate sticker (Ow, $150 + the $40 to get my emissions test done), and I happened to wander into the FabricLand there. They were having a nifty sale, so I got a new Singer-150 dress form for over $100 cheaper than they usually are in Canada. And didn’t have to pay shipping to boot! ^_^

I set it up as soon as I got home. It’s not nearly as heavy as I imagined. I would have preferred a different brand (some of the other kinds have even more dials to approximate your shape even more closely, and tend to be colours other than tomato red) but this one is the kind that I can afford. ^_~

I put the dress I made last week on it, so it wouldn’t be “naked”. The display mannequin in my living room is also wearing a shirt so she’s not naked (but she’s like a size 2 and has a torso length for someone 5′ 10″, so I can’t use her for costume/clothing making). I’m not weird, really.

Do you remember your OAC computer programming class final project?

More importantly (haha), do you remember mine?

For some reason Josh and I got talking about that class on our drive home last night. I can remember most of the games/projects I did, but not the last one. I remember my “Mario Sidescroller”, which I did based on a crappy drawing of Cupid that I did in [that animation program that we used back then].
I remember “DNA Man”, which was my version of the Pac Man project. That game actually fully worked. ^_~

I remember the dumb Pern-based game I did, but I’m pretty sure that one was done in OOTuring, because Josh remembers his OOTuring program being very sensitive to processor speed, and when I found that game a couple years ago and tried to play it for shits and giggles, it moved so fast it was almost unplayable, and because that was the year Tyler put all our projects on CD, and added an autoinstaller to them. I thought that was awesomely cool, by the way.

But what the hell did I do in our final year? Anyone have a vague memory?
I remember Pete’s totally awesome Zherisia game, though!

I did my first makeup test for my Draenei costume Saturday evening.
I got to paint myself blue. It was fun! ^_^

I didn’t get the colour quite right, I didn’t have any green lipstick, and I was too lazy to do right up to my hairline or the sides of my neck, but it turned out pretty well.

A pain in the ass to remove, though. 😛 I gotta get me some professional strength remover.

10161019

So i totally missed them announce BlizzCon 2007 a couple weeks ago. Duh.
But I heard about it today, so now of course I want to go.

Note to self: win lottery so we can go to all these conventions I want to go to (aka BlizzCon and PAX, in addition to Dragon*Con, though now the D*C trip has been threatened by my cat’s vet bills. Ouchie.)

Also freaking out over the lack of time I have left until The Clothing Show. o_0

Dax is now home!

But we’re not entirely in the clear yet.

I didn’t bother blogging it, but on Sunday we had to transfer her from the vet clinic to the ICU at the Ontario Veterinary College (where most of Ontario’s vets are trained in the first place) because we were reaching the limit of how long she should be just on IV and not getting any solid food at all (she would not eat, and even vomited back up any food they syringe-fed her).

Yesterday they removed a large-ish mass from inside her stomach. It was not anything she ate, it was an icky growth. It was right at the join between the stomach and small intestine. The surgeon thinks it was acting as a one-way valve that was making her throw up and subsequently refuse to eat.

They removed it, and now it’s off to hisopathology so it can be tested to see if it is cancerous or not. The surgeon thinks it “likely is”, since it was freaking growing in her stomach for no reason, but we won’t know for sure for a few days. In addition, they removed the mass itself, but couldn’t remove most of the stomach itself (duh) which would have been needed to ensure a “clear area” of good cells removed along with the mass cells, to ensure it wouldn’t grow back. So he is concerned that it might. Don’t know what we will do then.

We have to limit her motion for the next two weeks; no stairs, no jumping, no running. So we cleaned up the two upstairs rooms, brought her food/water/litter up here, and bought a baby gate for the top of the stairs. I gotta admit, I never figured I’d be installing one of those in my house!

WARNING! Graphic post-surgical incision/stitches photo!

Actually, not all that graphic, at least not to me. But still, not everyone needs or wants to see that, so it’s under a cut.

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