Things

Yes, I'm still here. Just dealing with the expected stress and anxiety that comes with mom's impending surgery, as well as the usual post-holiday blahs. So, some stuffs:

1.
Mom is doing all right-ish. She's stubborn and pushes herself too hard, and that results in her body saying "Hey, you really should take it easy" and acting up.  As a result, she experiences frequent numbness and tingling in both arms and parts of her face. We are extremely concerned by this, but so far all instances of it have gone away after resting. She has an appointment with the neurosurgeon on Monday, and I hope she gets this surgery scheduled soon because I worry that one day she will do too much and the numbness won't go away.


2.
On a related note, my dear friend Brigid has a big brother who is also in the hospital:

He had an"episode" while driving. Seizure or just passing out, I'm not yet sure, but his girlfriend got them stopped and got him to the ER. He's lost a bunch of weight this last year, said he just had no appetite. He's always been a tall hefty guy, and he'd needed to lose about 70 pounds but he attributed the loss of appetite to a change to some type II diabetes meds. He looked great with the weight loss and had no other complaints that we knew of. Apparently there were other symptoms, ones he didn't pass on, not wanting anyone to worry.

It appears to be Non Hodgkin's Lymphoma. The biopsy of the mass in his throat will confirm it, but they're already planning on chemo and radiation. A very heavy smoker since his teens, we know how that stacks the odds against him, not to mention the many months this has likely gone undetected. He's only 55.

Similarly, my other dear friend Jean (y'all helped raise money for her a few years ago to bury her mother-in-law, that Jean) has an uncle who had a heart attack shortly before New Year's Eve. So far, 2013 is not off to a great start health-wise.


3.
As for me, the other reason I've fallen silent is because I am dealing with some blog-related existential angst.*  As you are aware, I am both an enthusiastic gun owner/sport shooter, and yet I try on the whole to avoid discussing politics. However, ever since the atrocity at Sandy Hook, I and millions of other law-abiding gun-owners have been depicted as:

• murderers just waiting to happen;
• complicit in the deaths of children;
• contributing to the culture of violence;
• and atavistic throwbacks in desperate need of re-education, if not outright elimination.

I'm just so tired of being branded a sociopath by a culture that rushes to judgement. In the 1980s, I was a satanist because I played Dungeons & Dragons. In the 90s I was suicidal, and then homicidal, because I was a goth. I don't recall being singled out in the mid-2000s, because I think at that point the scapegoat du jour were muslims, but now that we've killed bin Laden and "won" the Global War on Terror, the U.S. needs something else to blame, and in the wake of Aurora and Newtown, the national bugbear is the lawful gun-owner.

I don't want to turn this into a political blog. There are bunches of gunbloggers who do a far better job of it than I ever could; I just want to be a geek and write about cool shooty stuff. But I feel that if I stay silent, I become complicit in whatever happens to my rights.

What I really want to do is become more creative. I need to focus more on both Pellatarrum and Unknown Ponies, and I have been extremely lax in that regard. Part of that is due to the fact that I gravitate to the subjects which receive the most attention, and it seems like more of my readers have been interested in Monday Gundays and Palette's Product Reviews than they have with my RPG interests.

I am NOT saying it's your fault I haven't been writing these things. The fault is 100% mine. What I am trying to say is that, if you want to see more of a certain thing, expressing an interest in it is a great way to encourage me to write more.

* In hindsight, I really should have named this blog "Existential Ankh". Nothing quite like thinking of a great name six years after the fact, now is there?


4.
Speaking of ponies, this latest episode is just more proof for my assertion that Applejack is indeed a Ranger with the favored enemy of "Plants":




5. 
I wonder if I should go back to having theme weeks.  Your thoughts on this?