Sorry about being slow posting journals, but I have a hard time keeping track of these things! I've been extremely busy lately what with construction going on at my house, a death in the family, Sakura-con 2012, having to see my boyfriend off to go back and visit his relatives, a funeral, and now a hospital visit too! Uff da!

The construction is pretty simple though. We had a small house fire back in January that caused our water heater to drop through the floor, cause an electrical fire, and we've ended up having to remodel a lot of the house, as it's been around since the 1940's and all! So far, we've had the entire laundry room gutted and fixed, mom's bedroom is being fixed, we're now getting two bathrooms in the house (although right now we had a pipe break and are still dealing with that!), my room is getting done, and I believe some other parts are too. My boyfriend and I have been working on helping out my mom and the contractor/workers. They're a great bunch of guys though. They sure do like making us laughing too! xD

As for the death in the family… My grandmother died in March... It's been a bit tough not having her around. She was going downhill for the last five years or so and just suddenly took a turn for the worst. I did get to visit her before she finally went peacefully in her sleep. Sometimes it doesn't seem like she's gone at all, especially when you've known after all the bad things that had happened she wasn't going to last much longer. My grandmother was 94. She's outlived all my other grandparents and I feel blessed to have had her in my life. She taught me a lot. From cooking, to learning about Norwegian, to taking part in the Sons of Norway and enjoying delicious Scandinavian foods, etc, etc. She was a wonderful woman to the end! Of course her last words that my family heard were "horseshit" to her being called one of the beautiful sisters of the Smith family lol!

After her death we spent the better part of a month arranging her funeral, but of course, my boyfriend and I had to go to Sakura-Con so we had about a week that was considered a "break" and had fun at the convention! I cosplayed as Undertaker almost all weekend and then wore my custom corset later into the evening of the last two days. There are a lot of convention photos in my gallery from Sakura-con 2012 if you'd like to see too! We danced, laughed, ate, and met quite a lot of interesting people. The panels were fun, the cosplayers were more than happy to stop for us, and I even had a few people that got pictures of my Undertaker cosplay! I'll have to post some good ones up once I upload them to the computer! :3

And as for the hospital visit... well, that happened on May 4th, 2012 (about a week or so after my grandmother's funeral). I woke up at 8am with horribly severe abdominal pain to the point I couldn't sit, stand, walk, lay down on the bed, or anything without suffering with the pain. Our Contractor took me to the doctor because my mother was sick at the time and was told to immediately go to the ER because the pain was getting worse by the minute and my doctor was afraid I might be having appendicitis. Well, it took several hours, a cat scan, and an ultrasound before they figured out it wasn't my appendix. It turned out that I had an ovarian cyst that had suddenly ruptured.

Now, all women get these during the "childbearing years" which is basically the early 20's and onward and can rupture at any time. Sometimes they cause no pain, sometimes they do, or sometimes they even cause your abdomen to fill up with blood. For right now though, my body just has to heal and deal with the rupture (which just leaks blood into my body) before I can get back to doing what I was doing! I'm still sore, but the nasty pain is gone. I'm so glad I had great medical staff at hand. And I at least had great Lab techs, a wonderful male nurse who did his best to keep me laughing and smiling, and a great doctor during my stay!