Dec 1

 Slept for 17 hours. Albeit with 2 pee breaks. But still. 17 hours straight. And to be frank. I had to pull myself out of bed to curtail it to just the 17 hours.

Part of me feels less tired. Part of me feels as tired as ever.

Sandy eyes.

Of late my health situation has really been getting on top of me. It is once again eroding my sanity and I find myself contemplating how shit it is, how pointless it all is, and how I want to stop suffering.

And then. Unbidden. On the back of that.

Yesterday Athena was front and center. And the ache of missing her hit me like a bus. From nowhere. Like I had never felt it before. That she was gone. No longer here. I am suffering. She is long past. Her beautiful spirit has left.

It crushed me. 

It made me feel all over again that my time is done. I am just. Sweeping up the scrapings. Everything around me is decaying, me along with it.

I really. Really. Don't want to be here.

On the back of it. Just end it buddy. It would be really simple. So simple. Just get up. Go downstairs. 2 minutes of effort. Call it a day, slice the wrists, stop struggling. And it feels so incredibly compelling. Correct. Rational. Right. Not a big deal. Yikes.

Sigh.

Still.

What can you do.

Shrug it off. Turn over. Brace yourself for another day.

It is insane.

I probably just need a fair bit of positive, happy things and people in my life right now to combat the misery. Just to offset the darkness.

Change gears, different topic, don't let the existential dread in.

In the few short hours I have been up in the last 24, I poked and prodded my box lid tests.

Eh. Meh. Not great.

I have achieved a better gloss finish with a second coat ( and then a third coat ). But. The finish is uneven. Lumpy. And it takes to be honest at least 3 coats before it has a consistent gloss all over.

The alternative glue and varnish product is even worse. Seems like it's more glue, and less varnish, so gives bugger all of a finish.

All the other tests of diluted vs undiluted have proved to be no great solution. Basically. It just comes down to multiple layers of the stuff. And then. An uneven finish.

Uh huh.

This is an unexpected setback. The stuff I am using does get used for cloisonne, but, eh, I don't think it quite works well enough.

So. I have some straight up varnish coming today. We shall see how a layer of unadulterated varnish does. But. I am now having doubts that even that will work well. It very much depends on the viscosity and how it settles.

On the back of this, and pre-empting a not so stellar outcome, I have broken out the emergency plan B envelope and ordered some high viscosity UV resin. This is a particular kind of resin that suffers minimal shrinking and is designed for what they call "doming", which is where the resin stands proud of what it's on ( this is the reverse of most other resins that all shrink and end up with the reverse - a concave surface ).

Assuming the varnish turns up tomorrow, I will run a few tests with it, observe the results, but, I can already feel myself leaning towards biting the bullet and doing a final finish layer with resin. Albeit a UV resin and not an epoxy one. I've not used a UV resin before - I do actually have a small amount stashed away along with a UV light, but this is small scale stuff designed for "goo drips" on miniatures - not for pouring. UV resins go off a lot quicker than epoxy ones. Their downsides are that they are more expensive, bugger all shelf life, and you can't do deep pours with them. None of which should be an issue here.

The resin solution is the last strategy I have if the varnish fails to work well. If the resin also fails... ( which I am positive it cannot ), then I don't know. We leave the engravings unfilled.

As ever. We shall see how it all pans out.

I'm going to give the varnish a 60% probability of success, and the resin a 95% probability of success. And in the end. The resin may give me the raised dome finish I was after in the first place.

All I'm after most of all at this point is a smooth finish.