Still alive and kickin'...

Okay I'll admit I'm bad about not going to the doctor. But I sorta pushed it too far this time.

A medical problem started last Thursday, but of course I'm the "wait and see if it goes away" type. Well it didn't go away and Monday wound up in the ER at Presbyterian Hospital of Denton. I won't go into detail other than to say that for my height and weight I should have 15 pints of blood in my system but I was down to only 7. I scared Scott pretty bad, my blood pressure and heart rate were close to the coma stage. In the ER I was faint enough that it was scaring me too, I could feel I was about to pass out and knew it was bad news if I did. Anyway they put 5 units of blood in me and I had a quick D&C surgery Monday night and came home Tuesday night.

I'm still dizzy sitting up so I'm just taking it easy living on the sofa for now. The ob-gyn has me taking Premarin. It makes your body think it's pregnant so I've been feeling nauseous, and yet the med they gave me for nausea gives me horrendous headaches so I'm not taking that one and just putting up with the nausea. Blechh

In the meantime poor Hubby is having to do EVERYTHING around the house, taking care of me, taking care of his mother who's living with us, running to get prescriptions for all of us, doing the shopping, making meals, feeding the animals, and still trying to work on car transmissions etc in the heat. He makes a good mother.

But I guess I shouldn't wait so long next time, Hubby says he'll kill me if I die on him, lol.

Speaking of dying, can you believe it takes the death of Michael Jackson for MTV to actually play MUSIC VIDEOS again?

How did they KNOW?...

Wednesday is Hubby's birthday. I about fell out of my chair when I saw today's Dilbert cartoon strip... Hubby's name is Scott. And, yes he would do this, haha:



Actually, in lieu of gifts he's wanting everyone to pool money together so he can get a rolling tool box for the garage. Seriously. And trust me, he really does need one. For several years he's just had all of his mechanic tools thrown in a couple of big kitty litter containers, so every time he's looking for a tool he has to pour them all out to find the small stuff on the bottom.

So are small ducks okay or not?...

The emails exchanged in this link just go to show that apartment managers have no sense of humor, even in Australia. Read them down the right side of the webpage.

I always did think that apartment complexes were run by Nazis.

Figure drawing class...

So I took an Intermediate Figure Drawing class in the Spring term. It was an okay class. We had a variety of models of different shapes and sizes and ages, unlike at TCC where we only had ONE model for the entire term. I really got tired of drawing the same woman over and over. I don't know how Freida Kahlo could even bare to paint herself so many times. I get bored using the same repetitive subject, so at UNT the variety was nice. But I also heard through the grapevine that the pay at UNT was much better, starting at $17 an hour (again, that's what I heard). I mean, it's not enough money for ME to stand naked in front of folks measuring every inch of the body, but there was no shortage of others who didn't mind. In fact, some of the male models are guys who have been at UNT for years.

Most of our days in the classroom were filled with repetitive exercises. Quick "gesture" sketches of 10-seconds, 20-seconds, etc, over and over and over as a means to warm up. Then 5 minute exercises of differing types. For example, draw the figure in one pose, then the model would move slightly, and we would draw the new pose over the top of the old one. Then finally, towards the end of class we would draw a "long" pose of 30 minutes. To me, 30 minutes isn't long enough!

Anyway, here's a few drawings:

Just a little 20-minute study


The next drawing was an exercise in which we drew the model from life on the right side of the paper, and then the model left the room and we had to invent a pose to draw from memory of the model's body on the left side. I must have had trucker mud flaps in my subconscience when I drew that left side:


I kinda liked the "compartmentalized" value effect that I tried on the next one to create my shadows. I'd never tried the effect before. I usually blend, blend, blend a fine smooth range of values from light to dark, without any obvious lines or borders of value variation, so this was a good exercise for me to break the values up more distinctly:


All shapes and sizes and ages, like this elderly (and very friendly might I add) gentleman. He always brought a book to read while modeling. And yet he still fell asleep sometimes, haha. The cloaked figure is a cement statue in the room used as a prop.


I think students modeled just so they could get some sleep between exams.

One more, a better close-up view of the elderly man's face:

Still here...

Ah HA! You didn't think I'd come back did you?

Yes, school's out. Okay, so it's been out for a couple of weeks now and I still hadn't blogged. So sue me. But I told y'all I'd come back to it.

The Spring term ended better than I thought it would, with A's in all 5 classes. I'm suspicious of the curve that gave me an A in algebra, but I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

I'll take pics of some of my Figure Drawing class projects to post, so take this as a forewarning of more nude drawings in the immediate future. I wasn't satisfied with my painting projects so I'll just keep those to myself. Not that they are that bad, but I just wasn't proud enough of them to want to show them. Vain modesty I guess, if that's a term?

Both Hubby and I are taking classes for the summer term. Many of them are internet courses such as Anthropology and Culture in Film (for my Archaeology minor degree) but in the second half of the summer I'll be back in the classrooms with Intermediate Painting and Art History Survey II.

Anyway, I should have more time to post now.

Beyond school other things are going on too:

• Our A/C compressor bit the dust but we're toughing it out until we can buy a new one in a few weeks. There's a nice breeze coming through the windows. Most of the time.
• I have an abcessed molar which swelled one cheek, making me look like a half chipmunk for a few days.
  
• Hubby's mother is in the hospital with some sort of back problem. We called an ambulance at midnight last night to transport her as we were afraid of trying to move her ourselves. Hubby and I were at the hospital until 4am, and after catching some sleep he went back and spent the day there. Docs are still doing tests to find the cause of her pain.

I'm sure I'm leaving something else out. When it rains it pours, but things will get better. Good things are happening too, I think, but they're little things. You know how yin-yang is. I guess we're yinning waiting for the yang to engage again. Yeah, that's it. Waiting for the yang.