2024 Archive
25-DEC-2024
test (...?)
23-DEC-2024
Two 'fer...
1.) Dropped off a Christmas gift to the amazing nurses who took care of my wife during her treatments at the local hospital. She would get treatments locally but for her visits, she would go to the main hospital in their cancer center. I spoke to the lead nurse who not only remembered me, but gave me the hug I needed. Thankfully there was only one person getting their treatment but even then I couldn't look at her. I spoke to the nurse a few minutes, gave her the gift which was a gift card so they can buy lunch for the crew, and walked out. Only broke apart a few times on the way back to the car but i'll take it. I'm surprised I was able to walk into the small facility without much effort. Seriously, i'm going to call this progress.
2.) I took two weeks away from working out after the break-up with that wonderful woman. Outside of my Saturday morning walk (5+ miles), I hadn't done much and today, day before Christmas Eve, was leg day. I was trying out a new workout playlist and I planned on going heavy, but right as I put "You maybe need to start taking this serious" weight on the bar, New Divide by Linkin Park came on. 12 reps later, I was spent. My legs wobbled, and my heart hammered. I wasn't going heavy today. A number of minutes later, I added another 50lbs because I hate myself, did 4 reps, and decided not to push my luck any further. I love leg day.
22-DEC-2024
The aforementioned thing...
I, rightly or wrongly, started into the world of dating again. In retrospect, I should have gone much slower. Fell too hard too fast and got hurt. It wasn't necessarily the 'break-up' that got me. Sure I thought the world of her. I still do. She'd held my hand as I took my first steps into the world of not being a caregiver. I can't thank her enough for that.
I was finally running free for the first time in years. You see, when you have or are dealing with cancer, one of the biggest demoralizations is not being able to plan ahead, like real plans: trips, travel, experiences, etc. You look one day ahead, one week ahead. Next appointment, next treatment, next biopsy, next blood work. My wife used to cry every time we left our friends homes. They had their lives and were doing these wonderful things. She was stuck with her disease. Even when I tried to convince her to do something even as simple as going to the beach, she didn't want to because we had to be near a hospital in case.
She was right, though. A hospital visit was always just around the corner for us. In her last year it was even more prevalent.
So there I was: free. Then relationship goals and needs didn't align. In short, she wanted commitment but separation. I was committed but ultimately wanted a full-time companion (read: not immediately but in the future). In her calculation, the two didn't mesh. I got out-voted and that was that. Regardless of how I made it sound, it was amicable. As I stated, it was probably the right move even though it didn't feel like it at the time. (still doesn't)
But again, it wasn't the loss that hit so hard. She was wonderful, but i'm a big boy. I've dealt with worse. I got hung up on why I was hurting so much afterwards. I couldn't pin it down. It has been weeks but it just dawned on me why. The loss is representative of losing the ability to hope again, to plan, to see beyond the horizon. It hit like I'm losing the future I thought I was headed towards, as if I am headed back to short-term thinking. I was just running free for the first time in years only to get tripped and run face down into the ground.
It's a hard realization. I think time is my best friend here and I hope I don't go back to that thinking. My friend network is pretty darn good and they're keeping me thinking ahead. My beautiful, smart and wonderful niece and nephew, my Mississippi family, are interested in traveling with me. It's helpful to be able to look forward to the planning.
"But except in dreams you're never really free."
8-DEC-2024
Rough Week:
I could make this a long one but i'll spare you. Had some personal issues this week that were a real punch to the gut. Probably for the best but it doesn't feel like it right now. The one earlier in the week, i'll post about later at some point. Today was brutal enough.
I love Christmas. I love the season, the old songs from long ago: Bing Crosby, Burl Ives, etc. White Christmas never ceases to make me teary-eyed when they're singing to their commanding officer. I have been a bit tight lipped here...about everything...but I lost my wife in May of this year. She had Leukemia (AML) and fought it for nearly four years. There were a lot of ups and downs. I did everything I could do to be there for her and though I can look back and find faults, I know I did my absolute best to make her happy, comfortable and feel safe.
It was her last year that haunts me the most. Her decline was painful to experience but she was such a fighter. She was in a good place mentally, before she passed. That is a small comfort. She simply went to sleep that night and didn't wake up. There's a lot more to it but we'll leave it there.
Knowing that it would be difficult, I dug the Christmas decorations out of the storage closet and got the small fake wooden tree we used as her compromised immune system didn't allow us to have a real tree, of which I preferred. She suffered no real tree and preferred a fake one. We have a large box of ornaments but this tree will only fit ten or so comfortably. The melancholy started when I saw the ornaments for the first time in a year. We have a close friend, an older woman, basically her second mom, that would give us an ornament yearly starting the year we got married. Seeing those were pretty painful.
The next box made my knees wobble. It was her stocking, embroidered with her name, sitting neatly on top of everything. I stopped to cry for a few mintues then texted a friend to say how hard this was. I wiped tears away and kept on digging for the small lights we use on that tiny tree.
After I found the candle, I had to stop for a while and go do something else. We (I) have a candle, also given to us by the second mom. The candle is marked with years and you burn it a bit each Christmas day to mark that year. We didn't always remember to burn it every year as most of our Christmas days were spent, like many, running to other people's homes. It will never move past 22 years at this point.
20-NOV-2024
Eating habits:
I never feel so different from other people than when I grocery shop with them.
4-NOV-2024
Just a thought:
Life is full of moments where one day you're sitting at the bottom of a pit and the next, God-willing, you are standing in the sunlight.
27-OCT-2024
Check Your Backups:
Circa April 2024, I did a series of stupid things and lost just about all of
my servers. Went to restore from backup and learned even though I was getting emails
stating the backups were successful, I had no backups beyond September 2023. Not sure how that happened but blame obviously lay squarely on my shoulders. A lot of changes had been made which meant those backups were effectively useless.
I had to go out of town so my server was shut down for what became half a year or more. :( Homelab hell.
So I got my server back up and running again about the middle of September. Web site wasn't priority so it went last, but after that, I got some automation going and, of course, the backups were happening daily. ...or so I thought.
It almost got me again. This time I have a backup going to a disk and to a thumb drive for moments I may have to evacuate for natural disaster. Today I checked and found that only one backup was up to date. The USB backup hadn't actually done anything since I set it up. It is less of a priority so I didn't want a nightly email at the time.
This isn't rocket science, people. This well established functionality. It's all working now so the moral of the story is to check your backups.
Earlier in October
After much procrastination and dealing with other, actually important things,
this site is finally back up and still not necessarily going to be developed
in any meaningful way as far as you know.
A whole lot has gone on in life, and seriously, if I wrote it, you wouldn't believe me.
The reality is this will probably turn into yet another blog™. Problem is that
I have to convince myself people want to read my midwit take on a variety of topics.
As always, no cookies, no counters, just endless, endless logs.
test
Like last time, thanks to Terminal CSS for the theme.