well, it's a journal after all

Okay, so here is what happened: on a scale from normal to cancer, my tests came back somewhere on the bad end of the range, but they won’t know exactly what is happening until they nip a few chunks out of me in 2 weeks. The good news is that if it is cancer, they can just take my parts out; I’m not having any more kids anyway. The bad news is if it’s not cancer, all they can do is carve the bad stuff out of me like a jack-o-lantern every few months until it becomes cancer, because that is how health insurance works. My doctor is going to snoop around for another excuse to remove the parts and just get it over with, since they've been giving me general woe anyway.

Kept everything together on Halloween until the kids were asleep in bed, and then Mike put his hand on my shoulder and I suddenly started crying. The deep, full-body kind of crying, not the dignified film-heroine kind. 

The next morning, I was supposed to be dropping off artwork for a gallery show, but I had forgotten the required labels at work and there was no time to get them. I was ready to give up on the whole thing, but Mike said no, went to the drug store to print new labels, and then took off of work to drive me across the island. At the gallery, the women in charge of the show frowned at the saw-tooth hangers on the back of my frames and said no, they needed to be wired, as stated in the prospectus. I felt hot-faced embarrassment, because I had read the prospectus, but thought it just meant the art needed to be ready to hang on a nail, not that they needed literal wire. I quickly packed the paintings up and said we could go home, but Mike said no again, drove us to the hardware store, and wired my paintings in the parking lot. I started crying again (the dignified kind this time). When I got my shit together, we went back into the gallery with the properly labeled and wired paintings, and the ladies cheered when they saw us coming. They were glad we hadn't given up and gone home, and by then I was, too. The Association of Hawaii Artists show will be up at the Ho'omaluhia gallery until December. Opening reception and awards ceremony this Saturday. Fingers crossed for my three little paintings.

On the way home, Mike pulled into Best Buy and took me to the camera department. We played with all the floor model cameras until the store employees had worked up a sweat, jogging back and forth to deactivate the anti-theft alarms we kept setting off.

The man went full Dad Mode on me, and I appreciate it.

So that's what's going on. It's going to be fine. Just not how I wanted to be spending pie season.