something I am grateful for today

I'm experiencing a creativity boost which has some concrete effects on my life. If I may explain:

Our living room has two couches that face the TV. In the evenings, Sharon and I will often settle in, a whole couch each, and watch sutff. As the show progresses, I settle in deeper, stretch out, get comfy, relax... and almost invariably fall asleep somewhere in there. Even if it's as early as 8:00, even if it's a show I really love (cf. Bones) -- I just get so comfy it lulls me irresistably. So large chunks of my life involve my participation in that age-old cliché of Sleeping In Front Of The TV®.

Now, though, I have begun writing the first draft of the script for my new comic. (Hey, that's how I do it -- I write a full script and do rough page layouts on scratch paper before I ever start to draw my final art. All part of my process...) So, last night, I had my notebook with me and worked on the script during commercials... or during slow bits of shows...

and before I knew it, it was bedtime and I had stayed awake on the couch for the whole evening! I know I'm not the only one who finds it energizing to work on something creative, so I shouldn't be all that surprised, but still.

So: not only am I on a roll in terms of getting off my duff and making a comic, but in the process fewer of my hours are going AWOL. It's almost like getting some extra life: -- not bad!

answer to prayer?

Decide for yourself [of course]:

My cousin has been suffering from liver failure (sorry, I've never been given a specific diagnosis) for years, needing a transplant but waiting for her turn and also waiting for a matching donor to be found. In those years there's never been a hint of good news for her and her condition has steadily deteriorated. Nothing but waiting and getting worse.

For the most part she's managed to stay home and live more or less normally, but she's had moments when she needed quick medical attention: in those times, an ambulance would take her to hospital in Cambridge, and sometimes she'd then be forwarded to a specialty clinic in London [2 hours away]. They'd stabilize her and then she'd be home again for a while...

A few days ago she suddenly took a very bad turn. Her son decided that she would end up in London anyway, so to avoid the usual formality and delay of a stay in Cambridge, he took her to London himself. He and his family had an uneasy feeling about this one, like they weren't sure if she would be returning home this time.

Meanwhile, my mom [a devout Baptist] has been praying for my cousin all along. They've always been unusually close and Mom thinks of her almost as a daughter she never had. But she told me that, on this occasion, she felt moved to pray harder than ever [she told me “I prayed so hard I cried”].

A few hours after my cousin arrived in London, the same clinic lost a patient who was a registered organ donor. All the necessary checks were done: this donor was a perfect match for my cousin and she was first in line and the organ was right there. Twenty-four hours after she arrived, they were finished “installing” her new liver and now she's in recovery. (Examination of her old, removed liver suggested that it probably had a few more days left in it at best...)

I'm not used to hearing stories like this except in bad movies. It's still kinda hard for me to realize that this has actually happened, but there it is.