Well, I'll be laying around the house recovering for at least six weeks now. The surgery went well apparently. The surgeon told me that they removed quite a bit of disk material which to my astonishment was immediately noticeable. I can now fully extend my left leg without feeling like a knife is being twisted into my nerve.

This is likely evidence that I'm extremely bored, extremely boring, or perhaps mentally ill, but I am honestly pleased to have had this experience. I mean the whole thing... the IVs, general anesthesia, muscle simulators, the shouting crazy, the blood drainage tube, the constantly beeping machine next to my bed... I have no problem classifying all of that as part a good and exciting time. Maybe I need to socialize more.

I have somewhere between six and fourteen weeks before I can report back to work so I expect to catch up on a lot of my reading. I think I'll finish "Good Omens" then maybe dive back into my many unread Icelandic sagas. Icelandic story time is the best.

My name is now Peter Benjamin Resseguie-Snyder. My last name probably won't fit on my work badge. Ha. Mwa ha ha.

On Saturday July 12th at about 4pm I married the lovely Nicole Ann Resseguie. We had mead, delicious food from Polska Chata, and pie. Aside from a dash of social anxiety and camera pain (let them... them being the cameras of course, burn in the hell fires from whence they came), it was a beautiful day.

Some of my favorite fragments:

-green skirt
-"I will"
-polish sausage
-silhouettes of tree branches through the tent
-smooches
-pie
-bats (with and/or without rabies)

Due to the extreme dullness of my duties at work, I have taken a great liking to audiobooks.

A list of audio books I have completed in the past three months:

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
The Demon Haunted World - Science As A Candle In The Dark by Carl Sagan
River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins
Myths & Masks by Joseph Campbell (lectures)
The Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
The Iliad by Homer
The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks
We Can Remember It For You Wholesale by Philip K. Dick
The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Paper books I have read in the past three months:

The Nibelungenlied (translated by A.T. Hatto
The Saga of the Volsungs (translated by Jesse L. Bock)

I am picking through the Prose Edda right now in my spare time. I seem to have a thing for old Icelandic/Germanic literature right now.

It is somewhat telling from the lists I think that I have little time out of work for reading, but I am really happy to be fortunate enough to have such a dull job that I am fully permitted to steer the course of my own brain activity while I'm there. Hmm, what to listen to next...

I have memories of a dream from this morning. Several very small birds emerged from a hole in wall. They sort of pushed and wiggled through, lazily dropping out and then flying away. The way they came through reminded me of how it appeared when yellow-jackets had done the same thing a few times in the past. The birds in the dream evoked the same sickly tense emotions that I felt with the yellow-jackets. The next part of the dream was less vivid but I recall viewing several different exoskeletal organisms being peeled open, almost like fruit by some unknown hands.

As of today I have aged 25 years. Nicole gave me some beautiful music which I had been pining for for quite some time and some absolutely delicious smelling spicy tea. I am anxious to have some in the morning before work.

I'm working about 56 hours per week now on the b-shift at Coopervision. Fortunately I don't have much of "a life" to be disappointed about missing out on... My feet are angry with me but the paycheck is nice and I am losing weight. Curiosity is nudging me towards picking up a pedometer so I can see how many miles ten hours of fast paced walking fetches me. I'm doing well and my supervisor wants to hire me as soon as he can so... hurray for job security

Despite not winning the Windgate fellowship grant, I'm going to proceed with my plans and use some of these nice shiny paychecks to start building a nice shiny metal casting furnace. I love casting every bit as much as I do painting and I think that it could turn into something somewhat profitable for me. Painting is a bit too personal and private of an activity for me to try and use it for any serious cash flow, but I can see myself casting bronze bookends and other functional/accessible things for that purpose. So yeah, it is past my bedtime. Time for sleep.

After more than three months of sending applications and searching I've finally landed a job with CooperVision (via temp agency). Very basic mindless duties but the pay is fair and it sounds like they'll keep me busy for about fifty hours a week. I start Monday, B-shift. This is a wonderful and significant change.

Another piece from last year.

New webpage is being worked on. I picked up a never-used copy of Adobe GoLive5.0 for $12 at Goodwill last week to make things go a little faster. I don't feel that I have time to build the whole thing in notepad as I generally prefe, but GoLive has always seemed pretty neat and clean so I don't mind. I'm not exactly sure how to structure the galleries yet but I suspect I'll come to a solution soon.

It will be a little less frame heavy... more use of tables and I'm trying to make better use of CSS for future modifications. Blah blah. Off to bed.

ebay

Time to try and move some art along. I have just this one piece up right now but there is more work on its way. I'm also thinking about toying around with an etsy store, perhaps I'll do some drawings to sell as prints.

Just a few things from last year that had yet to be photographed.

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