Happy Friday the 13th! I won't even try to pretend that today's post is about anything other than me whining, bitching, and moaning. For nearly the past half-century, Kathy was the one to listen to my woes and pat my hand, saying "there, there." Which weren't words of comfort so much as her indicating where her wine glass was, so I could fetch it for her (filled to the top) before I started kvetching.
But she's not here, so you've been drafted. I'll pause if you'd like to get a refreshing beverage first.
(taps foot, examines fingernails, hums "The Girl From Ipanema," wonders whatever happened to fidget-spinners...)
Okay, time's up! Here comes my litany of complaints...
• Today marks exactly two months since we lost Kathy. And it just sucks. The days aren't getting better, they just stack up on my shoulders getting incrementally heavier. I wish I could say that it was otherwise, but it ain't.
• Yesterday was also the anniversary of my mother's death. Which followed Mother's Day, which sucked around here. And both of which followed the Cinco de Mayo, which is the anniversary of my father's death. Yeesh.
• Some of you may have seen in the comments that last Saturday, I very briefly (20 minutes or less) lost sight in a portion of my right eye. Knowing this could be serious, I immediately went to Sam's Club to have their possibly-trained optometrist look in my eye with a surgical-grade flashlight. He said that things looked okay to him, but that I might have had an "ocular migraine" caused by restricted blood flow to the eyeball.
Since that time, I've had a CT scan which didn't show any bleeding, aneurysms, or hemorrhaging that would cause anything, but it did show that my brain has an embedded "arachnoid cyst" which my doctor said that I shouldn't worry about. Which would have been a good place to stop, but he couldn't resist adding "...for now." But seriously, it's probably not a problematic thing. Just a brain cyst that apparently looks like a frigging spider.
The doctor also had me go in for an ultrasound of the arteries in my neck (they're fine), and tomorrow I go in for an EKG. After which I'm having a monitor glued to my chest to record any mischief my heart gets up to for the next two weeks.
• For the reasons cited above, every day this week I've ended up going to the same medical facility that I took Kathy to for five years. As you can imagine, that's not an emotionally neutral thing for me to do.
• Meanwhile in the world of finance, I see that my retirement account has declined over $300k since the start of the year. Granted, I've recently had a very strong reminder that money isn't the most precious thing in our lives...but even so, a loss that big is still kind of a white-hot serrated rectum-reamer (as Milton Friedman used to say after a couple of stiff drinks).
BUT WAIT, THERE'S GOOD NEWS TOO! (If I can think of any...)
• Kathy liked sweet potato vines in our backyard but I couldn't find any at the garden store so I've been trying to grow my own. And as of this week, we've finally got leaves! I laugh in the face of supply chain issues!
• Thanks to the new
Omicron Subvariant BA.2.12.1, it's now official that the government has given up trying to find catchy names for each new iteration of Fauci's China Plague.
• And finally, experts (I use the term both loosely and ironically) are now telling us that
smiling is racist. Which is good news because, for a while at least, I can pretty easily manage to keep my smiling under control.
