Ahem...

Tap tap tap…

*feedback*

“Hello?  This thing on?” 

I guess it’s still working. 

I doubt anyone even visits here anymore, and I don’t blame any of them.  But I still felt compelled to provide an update, since I didn’t leave in a real good state when I decided to leave. 

I’m still alive.  It was touch and go for a while, I think.  After I departed here, things got worse before they got better.  As a result of the surgery to remove the growth inside my heart, I started throwing clots, had a mini-stroke that caused me to lose my ability to make sense of what I was seeing for about four hours, got put on additional blood thinners, which had me bleeding out of…

…well, let’s just say everywhere, and leave it at that. 

As I previously mentioned, I lost my job amidst all of this, because my previous employer was a typical personality in the construction industry – not “what have you ever done for me?” but “what are you doing for me today?” type of guy. They fired me on the same day I went in for the GI bleed, in part because I had to miss an owner meeting to get that taken care of.  I guess they wanted me to go to the meeting while bleeding internally.

In fact, during my job hunt last winter, he was actively bad-mouthing me to potential employers, trying to keep them from hiring me.  See, with health issues like I have, I’m a liability to employers.  I cost a lot of money, and to smaller outfits, costs like mine can get an employer canceled from their health insurance program.  I’m not saying that’s why I got fired, but it is oddly coincidental that they lost their health care provider and had to switch right around the time I got sent down the river. 

Oh well, they did me a favor in the long run. 

Since last winter, it’s been a long road to what I think is full recovery.  I haven’t had any more episodes of fainting or arrhythmia, and my blood pressure is down to normal, although I still take meds to keep it that way, as well as blood thinners, which I’ll have to take forever as a result of the arrhythmia and the micro-stroke or whatever the hell it was.   My heart rate also went from an average of 92 beats per minute this time last year, to around 75 BPM this year.  It’s having to work so much less to pump the same amount of blood now that there isn’t a big-ass growth/tumor thing in the way. 

Since we talked last, I got that job I was hoping to get, and have been as busy as I’ve ever been, for a variety of reasons.  I’ve been working hard to keep myself moving in this organization, as much for my own mental well-being as for the company.  You see, it takes a lot out of me to admit that I got fired.  Even with extenuating circumstances, no one can argue that I was literally unable to do my job last year, and I got fired as a result.  I’ve never had anything like that happen to me. That was  a huge blow to my ego, and threatened to drop me into another bout with depression.  Which I don’t want to do again, ever. 

So I am working to fix that by exceling over here.  The company I work for is a little different, does a different kind of contracting than I’m used to, and the ways that they were running work were a little different, also.  So they’ve been tapping my knowledge on how to run work in the way they do it in my industry, and I’ve been learning from them, too.  It’s been really great.

On the down side, my office is 92 miles from my old house.  I say “old” house, because I just sold it, because after almost exactly a year of commuting, Mrs. Goober and I decided that we were going to relocate to a home closer to where I work, so I can actually spend time with my family.  The way the roads around here work, 92 miles is about 2 hours.  That’s 4 hours on the road, EVERY SINGLE GODDAMNED DAY.  That, as much as anything else, is why I stopped posting here – I just didn’t have any time.

As I mentioned before, during all of the mess and rigmarole of late 2014 and early 2015, while I was sick and getting myself fired, and worried that I had cancer in my heart that was going to kill me, the Mrs. Was pregnant with mini-Goob #2.  Today is mini-Goob #2’s first birthday.  She’s adorable, and so is her sister, and I thank the good Lord that I got lucky, and that what I had was not cancer, and that I’m still alive to enjoy my girls, because they are everything to me.  I’m so glad to be able to spend more of my days with her, and less of my days driving. 

But, as in anything in life, there are tradeoffs. 

We decided to build a house, because I’m a masochist and apparently needed more stress.  The plan was that I’d get the shop built, put a bathroom and shower in the shop, put our nice 34 foot 5^th wheel in the shop, and live there while the house was getting built. 

Then we had the wettest spring I can recall, and I’ve been sitting on my ass waiting for it to get dry enough to accomplish fuck-all.  We sold our house February 5^th, and I just got final inspection on the new shop building yesterday.  Thank God my folks went to Arizona this year, so we had a place to live for a bit. 

We’re in our 5^th wheel now, in my buddy’s driveway, until the middle of May when I’m able to finish the bathroom and get a slab in the shop, and then we’re moving onto our property.  It’s 25 acres in the timber, about 10 minutes out of town.  It’s heaven.  It’s my sanctuary.  I think it might even save my life. 

If it doesn’t fucking kill me, first… 

Should break ground on the house by the end of May. 

Posting here may resume, or it may not.  I’m not entirely sure what I’m planning to do.  I need to focus, and taking time after work every day to research a topic and write about it, while enjoyable, is perhaps something I don’t have the time to do for the time being.  Maybe once the house is built I’ll go back to it.  Or maybe sooner.  I don’t know.

But the upshot is that I’ve made it through the tough time, I see the light at the end of the tunnel, and for the first time in quite some time, I feel like things are getting better, rather than worse.