[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.

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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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Thank you for all your kind words on my last post!

My cat is still not any better.
She’s still vomiting and can’t eat. She’s still on IV at the vet’s.
They let me visit her today. I cried.

She looks better than she did when I took her to the vet. She doesn’t have that “I’m so sick and weak” expression, and her eyes are more alert. But she still looks sick, just not as weak and dehydrated, and she was very tired. She threw up again while I was there. But she refuses to drink even to get the taste of bile out of her mouth, because it might make her throw up again.

The worst part is, they still don’t really know what’s wrong. She’s getting a blood test for pancreatitis today, but the results won’t be in until mid to late next week.

Here is my baby: (under a cut because she has an IV in her front leg in the last photo. You can’t really see it, but if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, you might not want to click)
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My poor kitty is sick. 🙁

She vomited several times yesterday (on our stuff and clothes and bed – yay!) and hadn’t eaten anything. We managed to get an appointment at the vet’s this afternoon. Dax was lethargic and didn’t even complain when I put her in her carry crate and into the car. That in and of itself says how bad she felt.

She growled at the vet (especially when she had to get her temperature taken) but didn’t even take a swipe at her. She’s usually an embarrassingly poorly behaved bitch at the vet.

She has to stay overnight with an IV to get rehydrated because she wasn’t drinking anything either.

They don’t know what’s wrong with her yet. They did some bloodwork and took some x-rays, but don’t have anything conclusive yet. Bloodwork was mostly normal, x-rays showed no internal blockage. Now she’s under observation.

I’m worried about the money, too. We already spent $400 fixing my car this month, and we don’t usually have “extra” since we’re trying to pay down our school debt so we can try to get a house next year. Moral: keep your emergency fund topped up, especially if you have to raid it to buy Kraft Dinner while in school. Rebuild it ASAP.

I miss my kitty. I want her to feel better. I’m worried.

Tomorrow I have a meeting with a professional organizer.
Hopefully she won’t have a heart attack when she sees my house. ^_~

I know I need help with this. I’m a firm believer in specialization. I work a specialized job to get money, and I can use that money to pay for the specialized services others do. I don’t care about the “satisfaction of a job well done”. Or rather, i guess you could say I don’t care about “the satisfaction of a job attempted”. If I try something, and it fails miserably, I don’t take pride in the failing. if I want a nice lawn/garden, I’d much rather hire a landscaper than try to squeeze in my own attempts at it around work and other commitments. It’s less frustrating for me, and odds are way better of getting the result I want (instead of just stopping when “it’s good enough” because i have no more time or drive).
Especially jobs/services that not only do I not want to do, but suck at them when I do try to do them myself. Organization is one of those things.
I’m a huge packrat, made worse by a few financially rough patches while growing up and after moving out. I can’t stand to throw something out if there’s a chance I could use it in the future. It’s happened a few times where I have tried to “be good” and throw out/donate things I no longer use, but then I turn around and suddenly have need of that item again, so then I have to go spend money on something I already owned less than a month ago. 😛 I hate that. I obviously hate that more than the piles and boxes of “stuff” that I own, since I obviously keep choosing the former over the latter.
So yeah, I recognize my own lack of ability/motivation, and I’m not ashamed to call in the big guns and pay someone else to do it (and teach me how to keep it up once it’s done).

Maybe getting the place cleaned up I’ll stop moping around so much, feeling useless both when I try to make it better, and when I don’t even bother because they have the same result.

Ugh.

Still sick.
Was sick enough to get sent home from work on Friday at noon.
My whole bod aches, but mostly my lower back and legs. I guess all this lying down in bed is stressful or something. 😛
We have a lovely heating mattress-pad that my parents got us for Christmas. It does wonders for the aches, but it makes me sweat. Of course, the fever is also helping with that I think.
My sinuses are filled with goo, and I have this lovely, rarely-productive cough.
I can hardly talk, and when I can it’s a lovely squawking sound that varies in pitch even when it’s not supposed to. I cannot say the word “mmm”.
I am obviously teh sex.

This is the first I’ve been on my computer since noon today. You know I must feel like crap when I abandon my computer on my day off to go lie in bed.
I only got dressed today because we needed groceries and I needed to pick up my birth control from the drugstore. Because I like eating and not having babies. Would have been really handy if Josh could drive, because then he could have done it by himself. I didn’t contribute much at all, beyond actually getting us to those places, and saying things like “We need gravy.” and “They’re out of our bagels.” and “I feel dizzy.”.

Now now I’m back in bed on the laptop, feeling sweaty and nasty and sick.
Just had to share with everyone.