Month: January 2021

As I sit down and start to write this I am literally at my wits end. It is January the 4th, my first day back at work since December 18th and that day was my Christmas party so I was hammered drunk by 2pm.

What this means is that I am shattered. I didn’t want to get up when the alarm went off at 6.30pm, I somehow managed to drive with my one good eye to open up my office and crack on reading all the “New Year New Job” social media posts that pepper this time of year in my line of work…

My actual day at work was pretty shitty, but it is what it is, and I head back home driving about 30 miles an hour all the way because the sun is streaming into my only functioning eye. As I round the corner into my road I am greeted by every member of my family in the street screaming at something or someone.

I let out a pretty audible sigh as I saw this because I was tired, I don’t know what has happened, or what I can do about it, but I know that I am already over whatever it is.

I got out of my truck to see Fred now laying on the floor close to tears and Laura shouting “Poppy” at the top of her lungs.

At this point it is important to give some details on “Poppy”. For the last 10 or so years Laura has “gently encouraged” me to get a dog. A combination of us moving a lot and me wanting a dog as much as I want to go to the beach meant I had managed to give this literally zero consideration, however now we are settled and Harriet is old enough to bug the shit out of me about it every minute of every day meant I caved.

In February I put a deposit down on a dog in Tennessee, the exact type I would have been happy with, it also meant I had kicked the can down the road as the puppies weren’t coming until next February. Approximately 25 minutes after I paid the deposit for the new puppy, Laura started texting me pictures of rescue puppies dotted around central Florida. Another $100 I might as well have burned.

This continued for about a month and it is no exaggeration to say I would get 15 pictures of different random dogs a day… Eventually in a moment of weakness I cracked and two hours later I was in a parking lot the other side of town picking up what I was told was a Beagle/Lab mix puppy that would grow to 25lbs.

13 weeks later this rescue puppy weighs 23 lbs already and we are about 95% sure she’s about 1/3 of her fully grown size.

Also… This dog is a fucking menace. A literal fucking tornado of a menace. I try not to swear when I write these, but I have no other way of expressing just how fed up I am.

So back to tonight. Laura is screaming Poppy, Fred is on the floor in tears and Harriet could not care less. I survey the situation and figure I should go to my seemingly injured Son first. As I head over, my daughter explains that the dog has got out.

It’s the first day I have been out of the house in weeks. I’ve had a pretty crappy day and now the bastard dog I never wanted has got out.

Along with Laura screaming she is squeezing some sort of ice hockey puck shaped rubber toy that makes a high pitched squeaking noise. I am pretty certain that this is the noise that is constantly played in Hell. To the dog however it is like mermaids siren. She comes running in straight into the house to start what has now as I sit here been 3 and a half hours of squeezing this thing and making the noise.

Fred has survived the ordeal and is walking in complaining about acorns in his foot or some other nonsense and by the time I stumble in after my day at work the dog has entered a mental state that is tough to describe. It’s almost as if Laura has given the dog peyote.

All I want is an hour of peace. Just an hour to decompress after the first day back in the office. What I have got is 15 minutes of high pitched squeaking, followed by 10 minutes of incredibly loud barking because the toy is stuck under our sofa. This, repeated over and over and over and over again. Before I go to bed tonight, which will be very shortly because it’s the only time the dog shuts up, I have no doubt Poppy will piss on the floor. It’s almost guaranteed.

During the course of me putting this together the game has become Laura and the kids throwing the toy and the dog fetching it, if anything the noise is worse. I have asked several times for everyone to just calm down a bit and for some quiet, in what has become a futile shield held wobbily against the impending encroachment of the dog jumping on my head at any moment. I moved the laptop briefly to ask everyone to calm down and Laura threw the toy at my nuts. It still hurts, but apparently I need to “man up”

24 hours ago I was really annoyed that my time off had ended, right now I might go and sleep in my office.

It’s been a while since my last post and there is really not much of an excuse. I have been really busy at work, 2020 has been a bit of an asshole and I am sure everyone has stories and experiences from the year that are unusual or strange, so nobody really needed to hear about ours.

The main reason for the lack of content though has been my persistent illnesses and injuries, which came to an absolute pinnacle on Christmas Day. Previous entries referred to me detaching my retina in my right eye in March. This is an injury that sounds horrific, potentially can leave you blind and requires immediate surgery. In reality, the operation doesn’t hurt, the drugs they give you are incredible and the worst part is having to lay on your front for 3 days straight and having a gas bubble in your eye for 3 months.

Well I recovered well from that and had a brief period of time where I was as fit as an overweight, 40 year old with diabetes can be. I had avoided COVID despite playing fast and loose on the Casino boat petri dish of disease several times, I even managed a Christmas party or two in December. Florida gave up on any COVID restrictions about 15 minutes after the Chinese guy ate the bat, so we can quite literally go anywhere and do anything.

And so we hurtled towards Christmas where a fat man with a beard brings Fred yet another version of Monopoly we have to painfully play again and again, Harriet crying because she bankrupts Laura and then giving her all her money back so the never ending game can continue. Me head in my hands after 15 minutes as nobody trades, nobody gets any hotels and nobody wins, as I spend countless hours as the banker trying to convince Fred he doesn’t need to pay the $36 rent for landing on Vermont St in $1 bills.

I did however have some annual leave left in December so I took a couple of days off before Christmas and arranged a game of golf. The day came and it was the first “cold” day I had seen in Florida for about a year. By cold I mean it was about 42 degrees when I teed off, about 5 degrees for those in every other country in the world that uses Celsius. This is genuinely cold, not Florida cold, but actually cold.

Still thinking I am a sprightly 21 year old I raced to the first tee, skipping any warm up or loosening exercises and got ready to rip an absolute bomb off down the first fairway. Perhaps not warming up was a bad idea as I immediately put my back out.

It’s OK I thought, it will loosen up after a few holes and I will be fine. Ever the optimist. By the 12th hole I couldn’t walk. By 14, I was laying down after every shot, By 16 I could barely hold the club let alone swing it. But winners do not quit and I made it round, came second and hobbled back to my truck where if the heated seats didn’t fix it, a steaming hot shower would.

3 days later and I am at urgent care watching student after student come in asking for a COVID test realizing it wasn’t free and leaving, while I was wheelchaired in for x-rays. $400 later and a prescription for hillbilly heroin in my pocket I am shuffling out, no better.

When my back goes, it goes for about 3 weeks, so by my calculations it would be rough but by Christmas Day I would be OK. Laura hates it when I can’t move, she thinks it’s an excuse so I don’t have to put the vacuum round, but I got us a robot vacuum so nobody has to. What it did mean though was everything was a struggle. Getting up, sitting down, standing up. It all hurt and it was an effort.

Going to the bathroom was also an effort, and without going into too much detail number 2 had a whole set of difficulties. Firstly pulling down my pants. I can’t bend so it’s just a case of kind of wiggle. Then actually sitting down. The toilet is low, I am tall, its a slow strenuous process. Follow that with the actual act, which again is trickier.

Cleaning up after is basically like one of those 750lb people washing themselves with a rag on a stick, and then I have to somehow get my clothes back up to my waist. What might be a 5-10 minute process basically became a 25 minute process.

And this led to the biggest issue over Christmas……

Nature was calling and I shuffled slowly to the smallest room in the house. It wasn’t going well. Basically and again without being too graphic, it felt like it was coming out sideways. I battled on and just at the point where I thought the worst was over I felt it. A little “pop” in my left eye.

I managed to detach the retina in my other eye having a shit.

The odds of this are astronomical. Millions to one at least. So on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day I was at the hospital being looked at, tested and then operated on.

Ever the loving nurse, Laura took the opportunity to suggest if I ate more fibre then it wouldn’t have happened, but as I sit here right now, gas bubble in my left eye, struggling to see that advice is not really hitting home.

So whilst I avoided COVID in 2020 my list of illnesses, operations and injuries read as follows;

Cataract surgery x2, detached right retina, vasectomy, skin cancer, right bundle branch block in heart, two herniated disks and detached right retina….

I will definitely outlive you all!