Survived!

Nothing is ever easy! Last night's ice rain made for an interesting drive to the hospital this morning.  Since I knew that the ice rainfall was coming, I put my van inside the garage and laid out plenty of salt. Around 4am I got up, sprinkled more salt and pulled the van out and warmed it up.

The walk from the van back to the house was quite an event, as I hugged the walls to try to make it back in one piece, slipping and sliding all over the place.

The drive out of my neighborhood was almost surreal. To start, the start itself took two tries to get the van pointed in the right direction. I then crunched my way out via an interesting new path that avoided most hilly streets in my very hilly neighborhood.... I slid a few times, but made it out and eventually to the hospital.

Under the knife

I'll be out of commission today, going under the knife for a major, somewhat urgent and quite unexpected surgery procedure with a substantial recovery period. Surgery starts at 0730; as I type this the main worry in my mind is getting from my house to the hospital (arrival time 0530) with all the ice still all over my neighborhood's twisty and windy streets.

Not looking forward to the next 2-3 weeks. But like Clint Eastwood once famously said: "Hog's breath is better than no breath at all..."

There are lots of things that I am afraid of, but weirdly enough, death is not one of them. I think that the fact that if I were to croak today I'd still be leaving behind around ten thousand pieces of artwork which have been sold, traded, given away, left in hotel rooms, inserted into Goodwill stores and/or otherwise left to leave an artistic footprint, is rather a calming feeling.

This is a major, multi-hour, robot-not-a-human-in-charge operation, which I am told has an 80% success rate where the John Doe doesn't bite the bucket (and frankly, I picked the robot over the human, because of something called "tremors" when it comes to a surgical scalpel), soooooooooo.... If I do bite the bucket, I'd like a tombstone that looks like a Pictish Stone, sort of like this one that I did in Scotland in 1989:

Clach Biorach Pictish Standing Stone
Edderton, Ross, Scotland
circa 1989 by F. Lennox Campello
Pen and Ink wash on paper, 9.5 x 6.5 inches