Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

I'm still here, kicking a little less, fighting some stupidity...  I guess. Back in 2008, I was hospitalized for over a week.  I had a significant amount of pain in my leg, went to see the doctor, and got an antibiotic shot.  And i was told to come back if my foot got "redder".  Two days later I was told to go to the ER.  They ran me through a bunch of tests, and a surgeon opened up my left shin and dug out a lot of infected tissue.   I guess I was lucky to keep the leg, the next 90 days were about as difficult as they've been lately.  i learned a great deal about managing my diabetes.  And I learned a little more about the world.  Which was, aside from my wife and kids, not too many people gave a great deal of crap about me.  Sure, I have friends, but when it comes to help solving problems, many of them land on me. Back in 2008, I came home with a stack of prescriptions.  A couple were for test strips, lancets, and a blood meter....

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...