Dusty Ghost Blog

High folks!

Well 2009 is nearly over and I have to say that it’s been one of, it not the most traumatic and the most thankful year of my life!!

As I mentioned before my pregnant wife had to be fitted with a pacemaker. But she recovered and gave birth to a wonderful baby boy we called Thomas David Johnson on November 5th.

After my son was born all looked to be settling down and we seemed to be getting back to a kind of normality.

My son is healthy and has been growing well over the last few weeks. My other two children love him and help out with him as often as they can.

Katie’s Mum has now moved in, and is a absolute blessing, as she is helping out all the time with the house and the baby. But more than that, she is helping keep Katie sane by being a GREAT mum and best friend to me.

Katie also received a letter from the hospital telling her that her heart block (the reason she was fitted with a pace maker) was not caused by any heart disease, and we had a mini celebration to know that.

Just when all is looking well, something happens to utterly shock us all!

A couple of weeks ago Katie was feeling very ill. We thought she had a 24 hour tummy bug, but that 24 hours turned to 48, then 72 hours then nearly 5 days! She was only sleeping about an hour a night, and had little liquid and no food (any she did eat came back up fast!)

5 days without keeping food down and hardly any water or sleep took its toll on her. Eventually she was rushed to A&E at the Royal in Leicester UK. There they gave her anti nausea drugs and morphine and for a time it looked like she might recover. She was even drinking and eating, good news we all thought. They kept her over night to be on the safe side and she got some rest.  She looked like she was getting better, but then in the next day she started to lose her appetite again and suffer black outs and mini seizures. This went on for hours on end, and they sent her for many scans and blood tests. They tested for everything from tetanus to hepatitis.

In the end they found that the sack around the heart was filled with fluid and was suffocating her heart. This in turn was putting a major strain on her liver, raising her blood pressure and…. basically…. was killing her!

They had to urgently transfer her over to the Glenfield hospital (one the best on heart conditions in the country) to treat her. There they managed to get her stable, and fitted her with a tube to drain the fluid from her heart, a very painful and traumatic procedure. That tube drained over a litre of bloody fluid from around the heart! They were very concerned that this fluid was infected and gave her top level antibiotics just in case.  They also left the tube in draining any more fluid.

Almost right away she was feeling better and got her colour back, but make no mistake, before they drained that fluid, she was dying!

One very shocking piece of news was that if the heart was infected, the pacemaker would have to come out, and a new one would have to be fitted. To take the pace maker out would take weeks of recovery, and the new one would not be fitted until the injuries had healed. They were talking about her spending a minimum of 6 weeks in hospital!

Katie missed our Daughters birthday, so me, all the kids, her Mum and my parents went down and had a mini celebration in the day room on the ward. It was only an hour, but it really cheered her up!

Eventually after numerous scans and tests, no more fluid appeared around the heart, and the doctors were happy there was no obvious infection. A Massive relief!

They eventually removed the heart drain. And kept an eye on her. They performed many more scans and were happy that whatever caused the problem was now no longer an issue.

Eventually she came home and at the time of writing this, she is spending most of her time catching up with her baby son. One of the worst things about all of this is that she could not spend more than an hour or so with her new son every day she was in the Glenfeild Hospital.  She is making up for that now and I often catch her with tears of joy in her eyes when looking at him.

She is VERY frail after loosing so much weight when she was sick, and her body is still recovering. She has a mild pneumonia  on one of her lungs that has to be dealt with, and he heart is understandably bruised and going to need to recover.

We also still don’t know for sure what caused this. They think that maybe there was a probe on the end of a pacemaker cord that punctured the heart wall during the birth of Tom. If that’s what happened then this has now healed as there is no wound to be found now. She received some anti-clotting drugs after Toms birth for another suspected problem, that should have been harmless in its self, but maybe these made the heart puncture worse. We just don’t know and there really is no way to tell at this late stage.

We now have Christmas at home, and this is going to be the most grateful of experiences for all of us!

I am VERY happy she is well and I love her so much!

We are both very grateful to God, and all of our very special and loving friends and family for looking after us. Some of them have been nothing short of heroic over the last couple weeks. THANK YOU!

On the upside of all of this, Tom is growing well, and is now 9lb 14oz!! He is sleeping well enough, though still has some sleeplessness at night. But it’s worth it for how special he is!

My other children are also well and have grown out of nearly all their clothes these last few months! We are VERY proud of them both and love them dearly!

So, to all of you out there:
Maybe 2009 has been a great year for you and I am truly happy for you if it has.
Maybe 2009 has been a disappointment in parts, but chin up, there is light at the end of that tunnel.
Maybe you are going through a traumatic time right now. But remember things can get better with time and healing!

To all of you out there; family, friends and people I have never met, I wish you all a wonderful Christmas and a VERY magical 2010.

Best wishes, and God bless you all!

Mark Johnson A.K.A Dusty

It’s with great pride and love I introduce to you all, my new son Thomas David Johnson. He was born at 10:39am on the 5th of November, weighing in at 7lb 1oz.

He wasn’t due to be born until 26th November, but due to medical complications, Katie had to be induced early! It was a VERY long night as Katie was induced at 12am and didn’t give birth until 10:39am!

There were a number of VERY traumatic moments during this process, that I won’t go into here, other than to say he very nearly didn’t survive. However, once I got to hold my son and look into his new eyes, it was all better! I have honestly never been so relieved in my life about anything, and I swear my poor heart nearly broke when I first heard him cry. He really is a miracle baby, and I thank God he made it!

Here in the UK the 5th of Nov is Guy Fawkes Night. It’s a time of celebration and fun. I remember sitting at one of the hospital ward’s windows, holding my son watching fireworks shoot into the sky. It was like the whole world was happy for him, and I have to confess I broke down in tears of relief and joy.

I am pleased to say that now Mother and baby are now doing VERY well. There is still some more recovery for Mum to do, but baby is doing GREAT!

I’ve always found it amazing what can be done to images these days. I’ve seen some seriously inspiring adverts on billboards and magazines around the world. The internet is full of clever deceptive images edited in Photoshop and other such programs.

I thought it would be cool to learn how this is all done.  I’ve used Photoshop to create images for websites and to edit my 3D works in post production. But I never knew just how much fun it is to edit photo’s and make them into a new reality!

Ok, I’ve created a new page to show off my progress in learning this wonderful process, you can visit it here.

There are only a couple of images there ATM, but I plan on adding more later.

The unfortunate thing at the moment, is that I don’t have a decent camera, so all the images I am taking on the one I have are JPG format. That, and the problem of auto focus and bad lighting mean that I may have to find stock photo’s to edit for professional looking edits. But at least I can practice for now.

A great cheap resource for high quality stock photos is www.fotolia.com They offer relatively cheap stock photos that you can download and use for almost any purpose.

Keep coming back as I plan on doing a lot more of this fun!

My children’s dance school teacher has been in dire need of a website for a while now, so we came to an agreement and I created this website for her.

Click to view

It was a challenging website, as it needed to have a number of pictures edited to fit the colour scheme of the website. Also their needed to be an editable private area for her students to log into to get information, whilst still keeping some of that information hidden from the general public.

There is also a promotional video there created by Greensleeves Films. Greensleeves is a very professional company who I enjoyed working with.

Julie is very happy with the site, and I hope it will be really useful for her, her teachers and her students.

A looooooong time ago, in a galaxy far far away….. well… actually it was a long time ago, but not too far from where I live….

So I’m working on a REALLY cool project for my friend Ben. He’s designed his own Star Trek  ship …. a long time ago ….(he REALLY loves Star Trek BTW!) and we both thought it would be cool to make a 3D model of it. Actually Ben had made it in clay once…. but it melted…. at least that’s how it looks.

Anyway, so I started working on the ship in Blender and it’s going well so far (more pictures to come on this later), and then I discovered…. SHAPEWAYS.COM!!!!

I kid you not this is the single most exciting thing I’ve encountered since ZBrush and Blender!!!

Imagine not just creating your models, but actually having a plastic version of them sat on your desk!!

Now I know 3D printing has been around forever, but it’s never been cheap! Well, Shapeways.com seems to be working hard to bring the costs down as much as possible for its customers.

So we want to make Ben’s 3D ship become a real thing you can hold by actually 3D printing it into a plastic 3D model!! Cool!

We had to make a few tests first, so I uploaded my DG Mascot model (the one you see in the background of this site) and requested a print to see how detailed it is.

Check this out:

Click to view

How cool is that!! As you can see the detailing is actually VERY good! So good you can still see some of the edges on the polygons, though that’s mostly down to me rushing the model for the 3D print and is something I will avoid in future.

So we learnt a few lessons and are really happy with the print.

BTW, this model is 6cm high and hollow (hollowing out drops the price dramatically BTW). It cost just under $27, which exchanged to around £15 for me in the UK. Cool!

So, I now have Dusty sat on my desk, looking at me! Bless!

For the pub games company Sovereign Games I created a number of new logos.

This is the only one I have permission to show right now, but there will be more when they have finished re-branding and updating their website.

My wife and myself are having another baby! Woo hoo!

At the time of writing this, Katie is 24 weeks pregnant and we are 99% sure it’s to be a boy!

However, over the last few weeks, Katie has been suffering with dizzy spells and heart rhythm problems.

She was fitted with a 24 our mobile heart monitor and after handing the unit in she got a call 3 hours later and was rushed to hospital!!

There she was told her heart was suffering from a heart block, and part of her heart was stopping for up to 3.5 seconds on at least 2 or 3 occasions through out the day!!

She was then told she would have to be fitted with a pace maker and would have to have it for the rest of her life!

At 31 years old you can imagine this was quite a shock for her! However, Katie has now had the device for nearly a week and is recovering well. She has had a few teary  moments, but mostly she has been an absolute trooper!!

Obviously this has scared us both badly, but it has also given us both a new perspective on life and we thank God for watching out for her. There really was only a small chance this would be detected, but the monitor picked up the heart block and now Katie’s life has essentially been saved, and we have a second chance at life!

For anyone who is reading this that supported us over the last week, THANK YOU!! We have been overwhelmed by the support and care of all of you!

Bless you all!

Peace,

Mark and Katie

It’s been a looooooong time since I had a chance to post anything!

So here is my last peace of work. I decided my skills in 2D painting are lacking again, so I needed to have a go at a portrait.

So here he is, Mr Jack Nicholson!…. ok so I know there’s some improvement needed…. but it’s not bad for me! LOL

I totally forgot to post this when it happend!!

On 6th June 09, a number of the congregation of Narbourough Congregational Church went to Bristal to perform a sponsored Abseil for the charity CAP (Christians Against Poverty).

Weather forecasts told us that we would have torrential rains all day, and this had a number of us worried that the event would be called off.

Well we all prayed, and God blessed us with small rains in the morning and clear skies for the rest of the day!!

That was wonderful for us as we from Narborough Congregational Church managed to raise over £600 for CAP!!

Sarah, myself, Andy and Elaine all made the climb down.

Click to View

It should be noted here that all climbers showed great bravery on the day, and we saw a wide range of people, from all backgrounds and all ages! We saw many young, and some old, some able, and some not so able. Yet all of them made it from top to bottom!

Congratulations to everyone involved and thanks to the people from CAP for your great works.

And just to show off, here is the cliff we climbed down, it was higher than this looks!

Here is a new image I created in Photoshop. The whole thing was made only using one texture, and the rest was painted using some of the tools and brushes in Photoshop. Click for a larger view.

It looks pretty cool, even if I do say so myself, but I have to give credit to the tutorial that helped me create this.

For a brilliant Stars Tutorial click here

And for a planet tutorial by the same guy click here

If you have Photoshop then give these a go, they really are amazing results!!