On Monday, Jake The Dog’s veterinarian had a conversation with me in which she encouraged me to start thinking about Jake’s “current quality of life.” I’m pretty sure that almost every pet owner knows exactly what that means.
Given Jake’s hind leg issues, it’s a conversation that I have been expecting for some time now, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
We all have fond holiday memories, at least that’s what marketing departments around the world tell us, so it must be true.
Here are a few of mine; whether they are fond memories is up to you. At this point in my life, I just laugh, shake my head, and mutter some 21st century swear words I find more fitting than Ebenezer’s “Bah Humbug!”
Today is hopefully the last in a shit show series of posts that went on way too long dedicated to me being ill in one form or another. — Management
Saturday brought Day 7 of Crud 2021 to me and Day 5 to Wifey. I would include B, but he’s 17, and his immune system got rid of his Crud roughly two days after he got it; if he had it at all, he still maintains that he was never actually sick, and it was an allergic reaction to a friend’s cat. Discrepancies on who was Cruded first and for how long aside, it’s been a long week/few months, and I’m happy to see the end of it.
The last time I posted here, I was bitching and moaning about the head cold I picked up. Well, that non-COVID-related illness turned into more than just a head cold, and three four days later, I am just now getting a bit of my mental and physical mojo back. Who would have thought that a bout of COVID would be easier to kick than whatever the hell this is?
Somewhere between miles 1 and 434 of my drive home from Pennsylvania last week, I made the executive decision to start writing and posting here more frequently. And I did!
Then I didn’t.
I’ve spent the last few weeks months grappling with a level of holiday-induced anxiety that I’ve not experienced in some time, mostly because this was the first holiday since I-don’t-know-when that I wasn’t on some form of antidepressant. All that anxiety finally came to its anti-climactic conclusion on Thanksgiving (Thursday to the rest of the world) when I unveiled the newer, fatter, older, even more, unsuccessful version of myself to my family for the first time since Christmas Eve 2019.
Imagine playing a Hindenburg disaster-level shit show over and over again in your head for months, only to have the reality be a flaccid leftover birthday balloon found behind the couch. That, my friends, is my anxiety in a nutshell.
My post COVID creep back into the world started on Wednesday with a short “Last Day of Quarantine” solo hike in the woods of the Sylvan Preserve. Then, I made it official on Thursday when I returned to the cold, sagging, well-milked bosom of society with a trip to Meijer to buy groceries. It was all very anti-climatic and soon forgotten.
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Later.
It’s been about three weeks since I last posted anything here and 7 weeks or more since I posted anything that I actually cared about writing, and even that is debatable.
What was that I said about things staying the same?
So far, my September has been better than my August was, but that’s not to say that I feel all pantsless and fancy-free.
