I will come back to you folks soon. This past year has taken us all down to absolute bedrock and we've been very frightened and pushed beyond all limits and you have no idea (but will; again, I'll be back!). We've climbed from that dark sea to some kind of shallows on the edges of Hell instead of in it, and so I'm waving at you, and telling you I'll be back. I' be back before the Winter Holidays, to post the card at least.We're not "doing" Christmas this year - we're not Christian and we're overworked and underfunded - but what we ARE doing is preserving some very important traditions, just shoving them around a bit. I'd love to do a tree but the hassle/cost/reward ratio this year is WAY off the charts in the wrong direction...Going to put up some lights and maybe actually make a Wreath of Khan even though only we will get it and maybe get a couple boughs in and hang the more sentimental baubles on them.We ARE doing presents; giving and family and togetherness and watching each other's eyes light up when they see what we got or made for them is what it's all about: it's about love as a force in the face of the Great Dark. There has always been a holiday around now, as long as humans have made gestures into the void in search of lifelines. And that's why we're doing it on the solstice this year. That's not a religious holiday, although it is steeped in it from every culture that's ever been; it's an observable cosmic fact. The days start getting longer again - but for one tiny non-moment... it is the Big Dark. And then the light really does come back, on this rock.And this year, this bedraggled benighted hellscape of a year, is ending with such grace: first on the solstice Ruby will open gifts from a couple of dear close ones that will blow her mind, and we get to watch, and we have some spiffy stuff headed Ruby's way from us too, and then a benefactor is bringing Ruby's beloved to us in the New Year, as the light returns, which is literally saving Ruby's life and in large part hers. And once here, we can feast: another amazing human has ordered us a goose and some boar, fitting meats for taking on the coming period of action.Oh, right, and I'm doing a watercolor card for y'all this year; it'll be along soon.

     Let’s take a break from the what’s-going-tits-up-THIS-time posts to hearken back to something random. No specific reasons for this recollection now per se; it just popped into my head, as it sometimes does. So here we go, traveling back some years now to that time I became the only person in the entire workplace forbidden from using the microwave.     I worked up front, greeting people, operating the front door, answering the phones, ordering and stocking office supplies, opening or (sometimes and) closing the building, setting up for and catering events and cleaning up during and after them, running errands, executing printing jobs, responding to emergencies (I was certified several years in a row), registering new clientele, and so on. At first this was a two-person job and lunch breaks were easier than in the last couple years, after the really toxic manager arrived, and this story takes place in those days so I had ample time at a reasonable hour for my lunch.

     Greetings, my (presumed) humans! It is I, your absentee narrator. Time for an update and I’m tired of the grim but there’s just so much of it being handed out all around, you know? You do know. But there’s good to blather on about too, fear not. So I’ll skim through some stuff and see where we snag up; not everything’s doom and not all of it’s gloom!      This has been a descent into the pits like few other, crisis upon crisis, basically since November and, in a more graduated version of the same thing, this past year. We keep being slammed with new circumstances and developments that require new solutions and equipment, new expenses, new contacts and support infrastructures, and new side adventures like the way my ex-workplace submitted my severance pay and the tax people’s reaction…      Let’s just… Let’s just throw ourselves through all that stuff and fetch up at a new beginning, shall we?

I know I've been absentee, folks, but let me tell you, it has been a roller coaster of a nightmare pretty unremittingly for the past several months and I haven't had the energy to write or do much of anything but deal with medical crisis after event after fiasco... Oh well, right? Here I am now.      I'll throw down an entry soon about the rest of the stuff and nonsense that's come up over this period and how we're trying to tackle it all, but for now, before I get on with what has to be done for this entry, is the super-swift nutshell version: my kid's neurological problems have continued to worsen and they have other issues I will keep private, all since that virus we now are basically certain was

     I think by now the majority of my blog posts start with "I'm sorry I don't keep this up well enough, I'll do better, things have been hairy", but, well... I'm sorry I don't keep this up well enough, I'll do better, things have been hairy.

     Hi folks! See, I told you that I just had to get that rage-filled reactionary post out of my system before I could write the stuff I want to: fun stuff, happy stuff, uplifting stuff, interesting stuff, pretty much anything that isn't seething with ire about the state of things or long-winded gripes about [my] health.

     Hello again, folks! I'm sorry for the long break but I just didn't know what to do. I want to cheer people up, I want to bring content that inspires joy – but this is also my blog, and things are not joyful. Thus have I faced that it's time to do a Really Heavy Entry, get a bunch of stuff out in the open, and then move on back to trying to make people feel better like I want to.

An essay on personal health, illustrated with photos of The Old Days,

     At the time of this writing, I can see well, and I'm danged happy about it. Getting to this point has been a bit of a saga, although to be fair, I've been here before. What am I on about? Glasses! They suck, am I right? Not so much because you need to put them on the front of your face in order to keep seeing the world around you, but because they're such an amazing example of the horrific power of capitalism over health.      My insurance does not cover glasses. Well, to be fair, because I have an expanded package thanks to needing a lot of physiotherapy periodically, they do pay for almost 1/6 of what I just spent on being able to continue to partake of the world in a visually acceptable manner. It's unusual enough that I could have spent money on this at all, but we're in a weird period right now: my severance pay was deposited into my bank account. I don't get to keep it: its existence means that the government will suspend our rental allowance until such a time as the severance pay has been exhausted in compensation. However, this does mean that I was able to "lend" myself the funds. I have a very small presence on Patreon, where I am sadly lax in being worth it, and it's always possible someone will buy a photo again sometime; with these shall I pay myself back (or rather, pay myself and my family back, given that all the money we have is for all of us to live on) for a period of several months. After that, I hope to save up for an easel so that I can go back to my non-photographic artistic endeavors (including a gift for a friend which is a long time coming): I must not return to my hunched-over ways now that I have my shiny new titanium intervertebral disc. Following acquisition of said easel, I need to try to get my hands on a couple of secondhand bicycles for my daughter and myself, to get us back into practice and condition and get her to college more easily, and then I can set my mind to saving up to replace my little waterproof camera which unfortunately is suffering from an unwell motherboard.

     Hello again, my folks! My apologies that I'm so sporadic with these entries. This time, I don't even have a good excuse, I've just been down in the dumps. I shouldn't be: I'm starting to get my health back, inasmuch as that will prove to be possible, and thus should be cheery as anything. Please consult my essay on happiness ("Somewhere Over the Rainbow Is the Big Rock Candy Mountain") for why things don't really work out that way, and why that's okay. I'm rallying, though. I always do. Improving my health will remove — has removed — a lot of my pain, and therefore distraction, but not the obstacles nor the burdens; I just need to lift my focus from the path and back toward the future itself. Despite how it sounds, despite me having the gloomies, I am immensely grateful (to…? Fate? Circumstance? I dunno, it's a phrase...) that I will now be able not only to increasingly deal with and take on these hurdles, but also to expand my world again toward some measure of what it once was: although my beloved hard physical labor is behind me now, soon enough, relatively speaking, I'll be able to get out and about more. Moving my body through nature in a vigorous manner has always helped me heal and feel better.

     Hello again, my buddies! I can now confidently inform you that I have survived the operation. This should be evident from the posting of this blog entry itself, but I dunno, just in case anyone thought I might be dictating this to my voice recognition software from Some Realm Beyond, I assure you I'm not. It's now a week — in fact, a week down to nearly the minute — since I opened my eyes in the recovery room. Spoiler alert: it hurts, but I'm doing okay. But let's take it from the top.

     As you'll recall, last time we checked in, our plucky hero had just undergone a cervical nerve block. My feeling at the time was that it was going well. This did not change. I guess we're at four weeks now and I can report that following the events described in the previous entry, my range of motion continued to improve, all of the soft tissue/muscular pain across my throat and upper chest disappeared, the crawling, itching, writhing sensation across my shoulders went away, the muscles in my right arm stopped screaming and jumping, the knots all across the back of my neck and into my shoulder relaxed, I stopped fumbling things, I stopped tripping over things, I could look to the right without my hand going numb, and my shoulder, which has been locking up horribly and painfully and frequently for many years, hasn't locked up once since the shot. Most of my frame went through a rapid and fairly agonizing readjustment period as muscles long-held in shortened positions or overstretched for years to compensate for my body's slow crumpling to the right were dragged into new, better orientations, but that's just fine: for a precious couple of weeks I could really walk again, by which I mean stride without my head pulling itself forward to look at the ground, my legs becoming heavy, my feet shuffling and tripping. It made photography ever so much easier, especially what with being able to use my right arm properly again. And I could lift objects without bracing my elbow into my side, hand things to people at arm's length, scratch the back of my head, all that good stuff, not to mention pain levels shot down something like 75%.

     I was going to start this a few days ago and title it "It's Complicated", but for a number of reasons that didn't work out. One of them was my general exhaustion levels, one of them was a family crisis, that kind of thing, you know how it goes. This is regular life, it does that stuff. I only have a couple of relevant photos for this blog entry and I'll put them in at the appropriate spots, but I did take a lot

     Folks, I gotta admit something. I'm pretty scared right now. I wish I could go back to a week or so ago, when all I had to be scared about were the emotional troubles of someone very close to me, the physical troubles of two people I care about very much, the ongoing problems experienced by someone incredibly important to me, and our financial difficulties. However, the universe is rarely that kind. We don't get to deal with one thing, wait a while to recover, deal with the next thing, and so on, like a children's video game. So it goes, so it goes.

     First of all, I apologize for the long silence. Again. I'm going to forgive myself because there have been Things Going On. Primarily, someone depending on me had to undergo some things that were immensely unpleasant, and do some things that were very brave, and I was very involved. It's all right now, or on the way to it anyway. Not that I myself have escaped further scathing by this thing called life, as, among other stuff, it turns out that what's going on with my left hand is arthritis. In a flash, right after the x-ray, the work with my ergotherapist went from "let's get your hand back to normal and send you on your way" to "the goal is to preserve as much range of motion as we can for as long as possible". It is what it is.

     Hi folks! You can climb down off those tenterhooks now: I tested negative, it's just been a cold, and I'm feeling fine now! My daughter's extremely important appointment can go through tomorrow, "all is well".      I suppose my best option is to use this entry to talk about the shambles that is the corona response in the Netherlands. I'll illustrate it with some photos of my goofy mug wearing masks I've made recently. Can't have enough masks, I'm finding out; seems like I'm always running another load through the washer.

I don't feel particularly ill, but I am sick. For the first couple of days, I assumed that the light upper-respiratory scratchiness was just my occasional asthma kicking up. It's not that bad, you see; I just get a bit of a light cough, a slight scratchy feeling, some squealy noises that can keep me awake. I'd just spent a couple of days cleaning out a

     I'd like to introduce you to some friends of mine in more detail; I know I've mentioned them before. They're a family, and I've known them for several years now. The patriarch, Pablo, is a very special guy. 

     Hi there, my peeps!      It's been a while, hasn't it? For that I sincerely apologize. When I fired this up I didn't even know where to begin in the filling-in process, so much random shit has gone down: health issues with my daughter, getting ready for the holidays (not that this involves a lot this year, or any year; I made a card, we got a tree, that's about it), lost a financial lifeline and need to rethink some things, and so on. It is what it is.