I'm back fro- 2 MONTHS!?!

Great Prancing Prawns has it really been 2 months?!!

I signed off my last post saying that it would be a few days before I got back to working on CJ because I had to finish my sister’s wedding dress and prep the make-up for an independent film I was helping with.

All of which DID happen – it just took a gosh darn bit longer than I was expecting it too.

I literally ended up in the trenches…

… on the set of 21 Brothers, an independent film about a battalion from Kingston ON, Canada in WWI. I got to do fun things like get everyone really dirty (with fake dirt), play with an air-powered bullet rig, and give someone a nice case of trench foot…

… Mmmmm juicy… ;)

Then my friends in Toronto threw me an Octopus’ Garden Party in honour of my 30^th birthday where someone ended up bringing cans of cat food as decoration…

… then someone else gave me a D9 “Non-Human” dog-tag as a present, and one of the party games was “Pin-The-Pom-Pom-On-The-Prawn”.

(No, I’m not kidding, and yes, my friends are AWESOME)

I swear, if you know me well enough, this Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Octopus-Holding-An-Interstellar-Ant-Queen cake makes perfect sense…… really

And yes, I finished my sister’s wedding dress (two days before the wedding, rather than a month early like I’d hoped). The skies cleared, the heavens smiled, the Bride and Groom both looked stunning, and much, much fun was had by the crowds of family and friends who joined us to celebrate the day…

But, to paraphrase Kermit the Frog … “those were disasters we knew about all along”. I knew about the film, the party, and the wedding all ahead of time (my time management/estimating skills just suck is all). I managed to squeeze in ONE short session of sculpting in all of April, and the results were negligible...

Poor CJ all alone and armless, relegated to the corner of the workshop…

The TRUE unforeseen disaster which sidelined my entire family for the last several weeks started with my father coming down with what we thought was food poisoning or a 24hr flu bug and ended up with him in the local ICU on kidney dialysis and a respirator. I’m very, VERY, happy to report that he has just come home and that at this point it looks like he will make a full and complete recovery.

But things were scary for awhile…

… and somewhat paradoxically that’s exactly the time I went running back to CJ.

When my Dad was out of danger and stable but still under sedation in the hospital I reached the point where I had to work on SOMETHING. I felt like I’d been holding my breath for two weeks and I desperately needed to do something that did NOT involve the hospital or mindlessly sitting in front of the TV. In fact my mother insisted I get up and get moving and work on something to relieve the stress and worry that was plaguing me.

And CJ was the perfect solution.

I’ve already had a few great 3-4 hour sessions with him in the last few days and am making real visible progress. So in the next few posts I will endeavor to keep further yakking on my part to a minimum while I show you what the two of us have been up to…