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Saturday, December 31, 2022

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.



9 comments:

  1. Happy New Year, Sig! I don't recall you winning the radio. I'll have to check the link.

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    1. It's probably too late but I'll save you the effort if I can. It's the video from "A Christmas Story" of the father with his "Major Award" - the leg lamp.

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  2. It's supposed to be a robotic procedure with three holes in my abdomen. I hope to be back to normal in a few weeks.

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  3. I recently had an inguinal hernia repaired robotically. Post-op, I discovered a fourth incision--in my wallet. It was a lot larger than the other three, and is taking much longer to heal.
    It might be better with Medicare, but procedures like these claim your deductible and copay really quick. $10k, in my case. The care was excellent, though, and quite successful. I wish you well, and I thank you for your great blog.

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  4. Happy New Year SiG! Thanks for your continual report on the space program - you almost make me optimistic about the future.

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  5. A few years ago I had the robotic hernia surgery, They fixed two and put in a net. I had a very easy and quick recovery. I hope you will also. It was one of the best things I've done as the hernias were really messing with my quality of life. I had more lingering effects from the anesthesia than the actual surgery. I'm a bit slow clearing all of the fog out after general anesthesia as has been proven several times.

    Thank you for your reports and observations. And congratulations on winning the radio. The only thing I ever managed to win was a Kenwood TH-21AT at a hamfest many years ago.

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  6. Happy New Year. May this year only be a better year.

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  7. Hahahaha! I listened to that song after my umbilical went. Ha!

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    1. Weird Al is the "King of Filk", I absolutely love his songs.

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