Timing is everything

And boy has timing sucked lately. I’ll skim over the part where I’ve been so exhausted that all those thoughts I wanted to think are just piling up in my head. It’s rush hour in there and all the lanes are blocked.

On top of all of that the car is in dire need of repair so it is now at the dealer. We’ve been putting things off for a while and now it’s coming back to bite me in the ass. This is going to be one expensive repair. If I was working I’d probably just buy a new car. And since my car (we’ve been using my wife’s for everything) has been sitting dead in the driveway for six months or so, I also had to rent a car. Our car will be in the shop for about 2 days.

So, all sorts of things happening all at once and not a lot of time to think anything through.

Urgh.

In other words, this is my excuse for not posting anything. But without posts, you have nothing to read and no reason to be here, I must try to correct this.

Is this thing on?

OK, so I disappeared again.

Sorry.

Remember that I said that I was planning on getting started doing things? Well, I tried. It is crushing me. I’m not stopping the new stuff on my schedule but I really need to rearrange everything else. And I really need to just stop every now and then.

You might guess that this is advice that I have yet to take but that I really need to.

Well, not just yet. Sunday is my Mother’s 90th birthday so I will not be slowing down this weekend.

Maybe next week.

Where I’ve Been, or At Least Why I Wasn’t Here

January was an extremely difficult month. To be honest, I never really recovered from last year’s onslaught of doctor appointments. January started off about the same, plus my wife was not doing well. On top of that our dog became very ill and taking care of her was exhausting. We tried our best, but the vet just didn’t have any options left to help her. We had to have her put to sleep last week.

All of that clobbered me – and to be fair my wife probably more than me. I found myself, and find myself, in a position where I am having trouble forming any seriously complex thoughts. Well, they may form, but I can’t develop them or act on them. That extends to things as potentially inane as a blog post (see below, or even right here). This is how a month or a year can just disappear and I have no idea where all the time went.

I’m glad I was treating January as a platform to move off from and not a month in which to accomplish anything major. I still have lots of plans, well, a few, anyway. What I need to do is refine my thoughts and focus on more discrete ideas. Trying to tackle a gestalt concept will just make my head explode.

So, planning and list making and scheduling are the orders of the day – er – month. You know, this might take a while, maybe I should make this a long term project.

How many?

I just replaced two of the luminous orbs in the bathroom fixture, thus answering the age-old question: how many disabled software developers does it take to change a light bulb?

Pointless post to resume posting

Just to summarize, what I was trying to say is not that giving and receiving gifts is the most important part of Christmas. It’s just that I feel lousy because I can’t afford to give gifts. It’s not the gifts, it’s the personal circumstances.

OK. So everyone probably had that figured out already. I had just had to go back to this one more time. I’ll leave it alone now.

Or, I could just post the same thing every few weeks or so. I wrote this a few weeks ago and didn’t post it, but I could keep it up if everyone thinks it’s interesting.

Or not.

OK, I’m kidding, I just wanted to establish some continuity here. I’ll move on now.

Let’s try this again

Just to be clear about the Christmas comments in my earlier post, which I am having trouble doing, I wasn’t trying to make it all about the loot. I like giving things. I can’t help it. It isn’t about what I get. Mostly it’s about getting together with family and friends.

Every year we all agree not to spend too much, and we don’t. Because of my current circumstances, I was expecting it to be even less this year. It was, but not as much less as I expected. I gave little and I expected little. My family was generous and essentially gave me things that I needed (books are a necessity). I didn’t expect that – well, yeah, I did, but I was hoping that it would be even more toned down than it was.

I felt guilty, and embarrassed.

I can’t afford to give much. I can’t afford to give anything. Like I said, I couldn’t afford to give to charity last year. It hurts to admit all of this and that’s probably why I can’t get the words quite right.

I’m babbling. I guess I still need to let this marinate in my brain a little longer.

The start of a new year

Well, OK, it started almost a week ago, but I’m still getting up to speed. As I said before, I took New Year’s Day off and even made it a long weekend; though I did spend some time on Sunday going through my daily planner cleaning out the old stuff and putting in new pages for the next few months because I did need to get ready to start the year.

That’s when I found a card that showed that an appointment that I thought I had for Monday is actually on the 15^th. This was a good thing because on Friday I got a reminder call for an appointment for Monday that I had thought was on the 15^th. So it all works out. That meant that I only had one appointment on Monday, not two. But I did start out the first full week of the new year with a doctor appointment.

What a surprise.

My wife had one today. Between the two of us, my wife and I already have 11 appointments this month and my wife will need more physical therapy appointments and I need to schedule at least one more doctor appointment for myself. I think we’ll probably end up with 17, not counting non-doctor disability related appointments. We just don’t know when to quit, do we?

I am trying to make a good thing out of this, though. I am aiming to be more organized and I want to start with keeping track of all of this and working other things in with them. One of my problems is that there get to be so many things to get done they start to slip through the cracks. I want to set up a schedule so that I can keep track of things, plan my next steps and generally make orderly progress in the year ahead.

That sounds a lot like a resolution, but it’s more of a goal. I’m not looking to accomplish one singular thing, I am trying to use whatever strategies I can to achieve a goal. So, scheduling and organizing. With a month like I have ahead of me that will be a neat trick and I am not counting on it happening. I’ll be happy if January is just the Monday of this year – that time period when I get things started so that the rest of the year can run more smoothly.

We’ll see how that works out.