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The Road So Far...
The past year and change have been a horrible time for me:
My mom (and most important person in the world to me - my best friend and only person I really had for sharing my "real" self vs. my "public" self) died in early December 2022. Totally unexpected, and a cataclysmic shift in my world.
My dad had been in assisted living for a year at the time of mom's death, with various speech and physical problems that made it difficult for us to have clear communication. Mom had been handling the financial stuff and spending large chunks of every day there. My brother and I had a crash course in all things about dad's care, and also making time to each get there at least a few times a week to try to replace mom (something we couldn't actually do). Dad got increasingly angry as 2023 went on, and visits were often an exercise in frustration for all of us, with his entire focus on expecting us to help him get up and leave, when he was by this time clearly at a point where we couldn't have managed care for him at home.
Dad's physical health declined slowly over 2023, and then in September, he had a sudden shift from "physically weak" to "actively dying" per the hospice care people who had been helping with him. Within two weeks, he was gone, too. In some ways, this one was a blessing. "He's with mom now" and "He didn't want to live like this" and all those platitudes.
A major I.T. "incident" at my tech-sector job caused our parent company to introduce a hundred different massive changes that all had to happen at once and dropped my efficiency to about 50% of what it once was ON TOP of the interruptions caused by all the changes. A stressful job that I've always just sort of tolerated because it pays well and I'm too old to expect to find something on par with it, had suddenly become an exercise in constant frustration and stress. This year was the year I properly understood how badly stress and overwork can damage one's health… and yet seeing dad's bills for his assisted living care all year had made me more aware than ever that that paycheck and continuing to get money in the bank is vital if I'm going to get through looming old age in some relative peace and comfort.
My years of yo-yo diets and just being fat finally caught up with me with a diabetes diagnosis, and with the other stuff above, I had been failing miserably all year at any serious lifestyle changes to manage that, so my numbers were getting worse and worse.
So, yeah, 2023 was just a shitty, shitty year and one where my main support person had been yanked out from under me. Thought I'd get this all down to set the stage for why a "fresh start" is not only a good idea, but kind of mandatory.
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A Fresh Start
For a variety of reasons, 2024 is looking like it's going to be a sort of new beginning for me at the ripe old age of 52, and I'm feeling a need to "talk" about things that I don't really feel like sharing with family/friends. Thought I'd poke my nose a bit deeper into tumblr than I've been in a while and use this as a place to blog.
Keeping this for "real world" stuff, and leaving the occasional fannish asides over in the main page.
"Hello, world."
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