Please read the Introduction FIRST!

Yeah, I know I’ve been neglecting the site for months. There are reasons:

Jamie got Covid… Bad. She was bedridden for 9 days, and then I got Covid! Mine wasn’t nearly as bad as hers, but it was enough to send me to the clinic. Between the two of us, we were down and out for over a month. Being bedridden is just the start of Covid… ugh.

November… The election! We were devastated, now we’re scared. The entire world is about to find out just who and what trump is… and isn’t. I wasn’t joking when I said we are scared; we both grew up in CT and have known about sociopath trump since the ‘80s. The reason trump didn’t want a trial in New York is everyone in and around NYC knows what a con and a thief he is. There isn’t a bank left in NYC that will do business with him (with the exception of Deutsch Bank). That’s the biggest reason why he skipped town to Mar-a-Lago. We are justifiably terrified of him and his coalition of wealthy clowns he keeps surrounding himself with; now, they are going to control all three branches of government.

We had to put our six-year-old hound, Harlie down. As with many septuagenarians, she had     become a member of our family… even the vet cried when we euthanized Harlie. She made an instantly warm impression on everyone who met her. We received a card from the vet several weeks ago. Enclosed were pictures of Harlie the staff had taken over the years, along with a card with her paw-prints made in ink, just before she was cremated. I’m choking back tears as I write this; I’m such a wuss. Jay and I still cry off and on… so many things remind us of what we had to do. You see, she had a congenital spine disease that we had to deal with several years ago (what a nightmare *that* was for six weeks). A few days before her death, our next-door neighbor fired off a shotgun to scare the seagulls off his dock. The houses, here, are only about 50ft apart. The sound startled Harlie, and she twisted as she launched herself off the settee. That twist caused in-correctable damage to her spine… we knew immediately what happened when her back end was almost completely crippled.

I got some seriously bad news about *my own* spine. In a nutshell: if I do nothing, I will become slow (or possibly immediately) paralyzed from the waist down (it’s called severe stenosis) over the next several months, it’s already started. We are in the process of looking for a surgeon who’s willing to try a specific surgical technique to stop the progress. So far, every surgeon who sees the MRI wants nothing to do with me. I have an appointment with a surgeon on 1/13/25. Wish me luck.