Well, it has certainly been a year.  My wife and I were talking recently about all that has happened since Halloween 2016, which was about when we put the gas fireplace insert in the house, and trying to do the numbers.

Here is what I came up with:

Fireplace Insert             $3500.00

Hot Water Heater             500.00

New HVAC System       4500.00

Refrigerator                       450.00

Car starter (2x)                 300.00

Repair Oil Leak              1000.00

Which, I do believe, tallies up to just over $10K in house and car maintenance, in just over one year.  On the agenda for the coming year – replace our 20 year old car, and try to regain access to our garage.

Now for the confession.  This is something that has been in the back of my mind since my Thanksgiving post about my friend Francine.  So far, we haven’t heard any news about a change in her status, but the truth is, even if there had been a change, her family would be so busy with everything that they wouldn’t likely be thinking of updating a Facebook page.

But, the fact that she is dying (or has died) from cancer got me thinking of how surprised I was to hear the news.  Which reflected back on me – some things I haven’t put in my blog, so none of you know anything about them.  While they aren’t as imminently life threatening as cancer, it still feels dishonest to not tell you what is going on.

So, let’s back up about 6-7 months.  I’d been using my home gym to build strength, and muscle tone, and I really felt things were starting to turn around for my health and fitness.  Then, one day I woke up, and couldn’t raise my left arm up to shoulder level in any direction.  The pain of attempting to move it at all was severe.  My initial reaction was, “Oh,, I probably pushed that last workout a bit hard, and I’ll just need a few days off.”  Well, a few days became a couple of weeks with no improvement, so I asked my wife what she thought I should do.  After some discussion, she said she thought it was “frozen shoulder” – something I’d never heard of before, and suggested I go to the chiropractor.  And I did.  It didn’t even take him a whole minute to confirm her suspicion.  “Oh, yeah, that’s frozen shoulder, alright.”  He ran me through some range-of-motion tests, then gave me some home-exercises to do to “loosen it up.”  He also said that, while cheap, this was the LONG, SLOW path to recovery, but it would work.

Now, today, I only sleep about 1 1/2 hours at a time, and it has been like this for 6 months.  I’m in pain constantly, and while the exercises have my range of motion back to about 85% of normal, the pain has not reduced one bit.  When bad weather affects arthritis, or migraines kick in, that is on top of the trouble with the shoulder.  It has reduced me to a babbling wreck more than once, as well as causing me to miss some past Saturday posts.  I don’t know what to do anymore.  I even have trouble remembering what day it is, without help from my computer.

So, this isn’t actually killing me, but it has seriously screwed up my quality of life.

Oh, and in keeping with the updates and confession theme of this post, the new program I’m doing for the migraines has had a noticeable effect now.  While the migraines aren’t usually as sharp as they were, they also don’t tend to go away anymore – ever.  It has been like this for a couple of weeks.

I’m ready for a new game, perhaps even a new avatar.  This one is busted.

Next lifetime – can I be Supergirl?  PLEASE?