shanmonster | Feb. 5th, 2004

I am cursed.

I've been trying to do some lost-wax casting for one week, and today, after two abortive tries due to power failures and scheduling conflicts, it finally happened. Unfortunately, my work was doomed. It took me about nine hours to carve and prepare my waxes, and today, the casting just didn't work. I think that maybe my flask was slightly misaligned, because most of the silver didn't leave the crucible.

Then, I tried to solder hinges on my necklace, but that didn't work, either. I ended up soldering part of my hinge to the wrong side of the necklace, and another piece to a steel pin anchoring my necklace in place on the brick. When I tried to heat the pin up to let the tubing slide off, instead, the tubing melted into a ball.

Other things I attempted also went wrong, today, so I came home. There's no sense in staying there and destroying all of my jewellery, one piece at a time. I hope I can do much better tomorrow.

f00dave is very sick with a flu/cold, and I've been feeling craptacular for about a week. I don't know if I'm trying to fight off whatever it is f00 has, or what. I woke up in the middle of the night with killer-bee cramps. My uterus felt like it was filling with boiling lead. I'm suspect my trip to Halifax may be a bad idea. If I feel no better tomorrow, I won't go. Drat.

At long last, I went to kung fu on Tuesday night. It all went to hell during the warm-up. I started blacking out any time my heart rate accelerated, and it stayed like that for the rest of the night. Actually, it was still like that the next day. I don't know if it's the Propranolol, me coming down with this flu thing, or a combination of the two. Probably the latter. I had to sit down for about half of the class. In any case, the night wasn't a total bust. I did extensive stretching, and I was able to help out some of the brand new kung fu students. I worked one-on-one with a kinetically-retarded guy. I feel sorry for him. He's trying so incredibly hard, but very, very little of what he does bears even the smallest similarity to what it should look like. At the very least, he did learn the difference between a reverse punch and a sun punch, and he did get the bare basics of a jump from cat stance into horse stance. Now, if I could only get him to take his frigging socks off, he'll stop sliding all over the floor. He seems pretty hopeless to me right now, but if he keeps trying, he might surprise me. I really hope so.

There's another class tonight, but I don't think I'll go. I still feel faint. Just getting up out of my chair a bit too quickly is enough to make me grasp onto something for support.

After doing yet more research on Propranolol, I see that if I were a man, it could be making me impotent. And now that I'm coming off it, my adrenaline production is going into hyperdrive, and my pulse is increasing. No wonder I feel both hyper and vapourish.

Fun times, hmm?

Later this afternoon, I'm going to get my eyes checked. I know I need a new prescription, because my already terrible vision has taken a sharp turn for the worse over the past year. I expect the new glasses to set me back about $500. I wish laser surgery was covered by insurance.

I get to go out to supper, tonight. f00's mom is in town, and she wants to go to The Snooty Fox. I really like the food there, but the place is so damned noisy it seriously gets on my nerves. I like to be able to hear conversations, rather than sit there nodding glibly while all I hear is a cacophonous roar. Ah well. At least I'll get some good food out of it, hmm? I'll probably go for the roast beef sandwich, or the Guinness steak pie. Both of them are tasty.

See? It's not all so bad. I've been going to the gym regularly for quite some time, and I'm finally shrinking my BMI back down to something respectable. I've upped most of my weights, and I've gained about thirteen pounds of muscle. When I see myself in the mirror at the gym, I don't have bulges by my elastics anymore. My tank tops are all getting too tight around the arm holes again. And f00 took pictures at the dance performance on the weekend. Although the photos are all pretty shitty because of bad lighting and no tripod, there are a couple that show well-defined biceps, deltoids, and triceps, even though I never flex my arms while I dance. Hoorah! It's about time my muscles came back. I've missed them.

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