Happy New Year 2023!

New Year's Eve is upon us, and I just want to wish all of you a happy New Year.  By this time of the year, pretty much every year, I'm sick of the "year in review" shows on TV, so I'll just post a little about my year in review. 

In some aspects, it was like that quote from Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" talking about the French revolution.  It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.  Unfortunately, the things under "the worst of times" outnumbered the other side.  

In the big picture sense, a welcome spot is that I just hit my seventh year of retirement.  Although not planned to be this way, we get by pretty comfortably on my pension and our social security checks.  I only worked at one company that had a pension plan, my last job, and the pension went down from what it was set to be a few years before I retired when the company went through a major reorg.  

The brightest "best of times" incident was that I won a major award from a ham radio contest.  Not a leg lamp, but a new, top-of-the-line transceiver shipped to my door.  The ironic part was that it was the same exact model I bought with the insurance payout from our lightning strike, an Icom IC-7610, so I replaced that two year old radio with a brand new version of the same model.  Of course, since it's my "lucky radio" nothing I do with will ever fail, nothing will ever be wrong or go bad.  

The "worst of times" category was almost all health related.  Both my health and both of our two cats.  Unfortunately, we lost our girl cat Aurora to cancer 10 days before Christmas.  The previous month was consumed with trying to help her with multiple trips to the doctors and multiple things tried.

From February until October, our attention was on our alpha cat, Mojo.  His yearly physical in January had shown odd blood cell counts; they could do some tests for feline leukemia and another cancer that I can't recall, both of which showed no cancer.  Thankfully, in the long run he's fine and while a bit thinner than a few years ago, he also acts like he feels much better than he did earlier in the year.  Cats get thinner with age naturally - with no effort on our parts - and I can assure you they don't read diet books or count calories in obsessive-compulsive fits.

On my count, I'll probably talk more about that this later.  Long story short: I've known I had an umbilical (belly button) hernia for five years, and after a bunch of testing this summer, determined I have a second hernia, a hiatal hernia (top of the stomach where the esophagus goes through the diaphragm).  Thankfully, living with two hernias doesn't spoil the meter of my favorite song.  This second hernia is going to require surgery to fix, though, and that's going to be later in January.

Let's hope the S doesn't HTF until later in the year.  

EDIT 12/31/22 1046PM EST:  Mistake in post title.