Gloom, Despair, and Agony on Me

The very bad, horrible, terrible, no good bad year...

This is not going to be a pity party...really. But maybe it's like an unexpected postcard in the past that a family's traveling son might send , beginning with something like this:

"Hi all, wanted to let you know that I was robbed at the bus station on my way from...get back with you soon."

Anyone who might have still been looking for new entries for my blog will have seen that I haven't posted since May of 2018. I'm still kicking and still getting my work done, as well as all other stuff Cliff and I have done. 2018 was a good year for my editing business. But two things completely stopped during 2018—keeping up with yard work and writing my blog.

So' here's the bad, horrible, terrible, no good stuff, beginning with January 2018 and continuing through the year. I discovered that my roof leaked. When I bought the house and negotiated repairs before I closed on it, I said that a leak had to be repaired. In the two years that the house was vacant, a portion of the keeping room ceiling had been ruined from a leak. Long story short, before I closed on the house, it was inspected and I went over the report with a fine-tooth comb, as well as checked with the realtor that the ceiling in the keeping room had been repaired, etc. What was never revealed or discovered was that the roof leak had not been repaired even though the man who was hired to fix it thought he had...hmmm...anyway, when the ceiling in the keeping room began to leak again (big attic over that), I finally made myself climb up into the attic and take a look. There were buckets that had been collecting water from the roof leak and they finally overflowed in January 2018, which is why the keeping room ceiling started a new leak.

Not only that, the roof leak was so chronic it rotted portions of the attic floor; the owner prior to me, the one from whom I bought the house, had to have known about the roof leak and had simply "forgotten" that there was a problem. After all this person had lived in the house for fourteen years! This person is the one who had placed the buckets up there. This person is very rich and would bash me with lawyers.

But that was just the beginning...

My car started failing me. There had been a kind of hesitation in the system when I was running down the road, as if the engine was about to die. Turned out it was a vacuum hose with a hole in it. That was fixed, but then the engine cooling fans started whining before I shut off the engine. One repair shop said that was normal, but I knew it wasn't, so I took it do the dealer, who agreed that I should replace the radiator cooling fan, which they did. After that, the radiator started leaking. I took it to a local person who said that the dealership had not taken the time required to carefully remove the fans and had rushed to get the job done and had consequently gouged a hole in the radiator, and I can say from looking at the tight-fit for the fans and the radiator that there's no room for error. These were not cheap fixes...thousand of dollars.

This was followed by a cold snap, and the next day after that I thought I heard water running. I looked in the lean-to utility room, and sure enough, there was water overflowing from the washing machine. I had to turn off the water at the source and pull out the dryer to get to the washer and then have someone check it out. Some unit in the washer had been frozen (or something???) and allowed the washer to fill with water with no way to shut it off. Both the washer and dryer were old, and Cliff helped me buy a new used pair...hundreds of dollars.

Okay, what you might notice is that the washer/dryer are in this little lean-to pretty tight. The water heater is also in this lean-to. Luckily the outside looks pretty good and not a real mess as this interior is. The "utility room" was obviously an afterthought on this hundred-plus-year-old house. Had I the money, I would have this thing ripped off and a proper utility room added.

We took a trip to Rosebud, Texas, in May 2018 and stayed with Cliff's brother and sister-in-law.

Downtown Rosebud, TX Another nice little town.

It was nice, but I decided to come down with a debilitating cold, and the whole time I was there I developed a hacking cough that would take my breath away. I turned 70 just prior to the trip, and for many years, I had been telling myself, if I could make a carton (ten packs) of cigarettes last for thirty days, and if I hit a significant milestone (turning 70, for example), I would try to quit smoking one last time. They say there's never a good time to quite smoking, but as it turns out, turning 70 and having a severe cough (so severe that I couldn't draw the smoke into my lungs without coughing) was a very good thing. I quit cold turkey, just like my father did when he was in his mid 40s. It is now February 2019 (nine months later) and I am still quit. Anyone want to know what mental trigger I used to avoid picking up another cigarette? I told myself that none of the side-effects one associates with cig-craving would be alleviated with a cigarette. In other words, that "hole" in my stomach would not be filled with smoking a cigarette; those nervous jitters would not go away with a cigarette; that irritability was caused by something else...not needing a cigarette. And it worked. I had a few dreams where I smoked a cigarette, but even in my dreams, I realized what I had done and threw the cigarette down. When I woke up I was relieved it was a dream.

It worked. That was the thing that turned the corner for me on 2018 being a bad year. In fact, the result of the mid-term elections was also a good thing.

The thing is, I endured all the rotten things that went wrong with my house and car and there are still issues I can't yet afford to fix properly, but I've continued with all my other activities and will get back with the yard work come spring or some nice days in the waning days of winter...through March 2019. Already looking at the end of February 2019 and looking March in the face. This was in all a mild winter, with lots of rain. So I'm hoping Spring will be great and energizing.

We had a tornado that did a lot of damage yesterday. A clearer picture of just where it hit and the damage it did is emerging. But I'll leave that as a kind of footnote to this post. A kind of...yes, I had a bad year, but tornados are worse.

I'll leave you with a luscious drone view of one part of Columbus and the S.D. Lee High School that is now being renovated into a shopping center, loft apartments, etc. (multiple use). It cannot be torn down, because it is considered to be architecturally significant as a "Mid-Century Modern" structure. Not my favorite style but I'll be glad to see what they do with it. And it will certainly lift that area of Columbus up a little when it's finished.