A fair amount's happened since my last journal entry. Let's see how quickly I can sum it all up...
We finally had to put our oldest guinea pig, Sander, to sleep back in mid-May. After he spent nine months and several vet visits battling a re-occurring lesion on his side and growing weaker the longer the fight was drawn out, I made the decision to let him go. He was seven and a half years old. Then, a month later, we brought two little guinea pig girls into our home to keep our remaining older pig company. We named them Makani and Nalukea, and they are now sharing the big ten square foot C&C cage with old Chiridee. The youngsters are energetic and shy, and do a lot of running about at the smallest of disturbances, but Chiridee tolerates them well and even shares her food without issue.
I finally had my old desktop checked after it crashed hard a few months ago and never came back up again out of BSoD territory. I've been told the hard drive has failed and so did an attempted transfer of data onto an external drive I recently bought. I didn't want to pay out a load of cash for data recovery, however, so I got everything back and will be looking for cheaper, better options over the next few months. Whether or not I've just lost a good amount of my data remains to be seen. In the meantime, I bought a new desktop to replace the old one and took things a couple steps up in terms of processing power and hard drive space. I've also ordered an over-sized scanner/printer to round out my new set-up, since my previous scanner is so old there are no drivers out for my current operating system. As is, I needed something that could handle 11"x17" bristol sheets, anyway. All of this is WAY more new hardware than I ever intended to get at one time and it'll take me a some time to pay it all off, but getting art done and posted without it would have been close to impossible. Something I can't really afford with a convention and a local art competition looming on the horizon.
My fiance is scheduled on the 16th for what we both hope and pray is his final surgery. This will make it five surgeries in the last year and nine months. It's been a long hard road, one I hope no one reading this EVER has to go through. And no lie, I'm anxious about the upcoming operation. But come what will, we'll do our best to get through it.
In the meantime, in between all that's been going on, I've managed to pick up my art tools again and do some sketching. Unfortunately, without a working scanner I have nothing to show for it online (save for a few cell phone photographs here and there), but hopefully my new printer/scanner will be here soon and I'll finally be able to start posting art here again. (I do have a tablet I use off and on for sketching, but on the whole I'm much more of a traditional pencil, paper and inks sort of artist. I feel I do my best work that way.)
So...at this point it's a matter of pushing past my remaining tech issues and helping my fiance get through his last surgery in terms of hospital stay and overall recovery. I'm a bit more hopeful than I was around the start of the year, something that I'd like as a continuing trend of improvement. We'll see how it all goes.