Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

I recall an old "joke" I stumbled over a few years ago which is even more painful now than when I heard it originally. "If I knew I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself."   Not that I had any reason to believe I was going to die young.  I have managed to get myself past 58, where my father had a massive heart attack, and while I do have a pacemaker earlier than Dad got his, I do attribute that to better detection and knowing what we now know.  My father was having episodes where he would essentially faint and have what my mother called "shakes".  I was out of the house by this time, so the tales of what he went through were weird.   The doctors attached him to monitors in the office, and nothing stood out.  They sent him home with a monitor, which one of my sisters described as a "tricorder".  It hung on a strap from his shoulder, and was about the side of an old-style cassette recorder - maybe a foot long, three ...

 Been rough couple of weeks around here, but life keeps going.   From the top, no, the new job is still doing great.  I am settling into the role and getting back to comfortable with the process.  It's a little bit different than I had done for the previous seven years, but it works.  And the company is a good one, with great people.  I'm extremely fortunate in that regard.   In other areas, no, we haven't made it back out to the Renaissance Festival after our first visit two weeks ago.  And the chances don't look good, thanks to yours truly, doing stupid stuff again. There were also two losses that felt pretty big, to me.  I'm not going to share the names, because through most of the world, they will mean nothing.   To me, they were quite important people in small segments of my life.  The first was a high school associate, someone I knew, could say "hey, how's it going?" to him and get a grin and a response.  T...