Some Housekeeping issues

Over the several months that I have maintained this blog I have made a few statements or mentioned things were going on.

First, the neighbor that said I had to stick around to help raise his new baby daughter. He and his wife, and baby, moved in August. They now live some forty miles away. We see each other very seldom anymore.

Next, I said I was going to build a CNC machine. Well, I got some of the software, a computer and some parts to build it. But the project sat idle because in my gut I didn't feel like it was going to be accurate enough to do the job. I was proved correct when the source of my design admitted it had some problems along the same lines I had concerns about. I still plan to build one I just have to get a design idea that will fit my requirements. I also play around with the idea of getting a machine lathe.

I talked about getting a job and doing some programming. Well, that is still on the table, just what direction it might go is up in the air. I have studied .NET and I have seen the sorts of things there that would drive a logical thinker out the door. My research has shown that .NET is quite probably the worst collection of ways to do things in programming for the web that I have encountered so far. And it keeps getting worse with everything I learn. I have read on every version of the software back to the beginning at Visual basic, none of which is entirely downward compatible, and it just gets worse the deeper I dig. I have decided to go with PHP and MySQL because they are smoother ways to go and they are not M/S, they are open source. You may wonder what this has to do with cancer. It is simple really. Programming is something to do going forward that might actually pay for the life I will be living after I get cured.

And finally, the problem with my stent. Nobody much showed any interest in pursuing the pain, so it went away. It is not all good though. My blood sugars are back to 250 to 350. I am losing weight at the rate of about 3 pounds a week. There may be some reasons for that besides the cancer coming back. For one I have been unduly stressed out by a member of my extended family who has proven to be more irrational than even I had guessed and I thought she was bat shit crazy before. When a relative exceeds even the worst expectations, then it is time to isolate that virus and limit the damage that person might cause. But it has been a very trying week while she wrote email after email to me, each completely repudiating the previous and each more strident then anything before, even though I answered only the first of them. She held out for three more messages and each got more strident. All over Thanksgiving dinner. Jeez, I am thinking of leaving town for Christmas. But in the meantime I have been very stressed out and drinking to get a distance between me and reality. I am getting to hate drinking. This world needs alternatives to getting drunk to reduce stress. The obvious solution to removing a stress source is murder but there are actual legal strategies in place to directly discourage that sort of behavior. So I have to sort out how I will de-stress the holidays and relatives and avoid drinking myself into oblivion. Apparently exercise is a possibility, but with some exclusions.

So I go into Thanksgiving week with some optimism. I put all my Steely Dan on and played it loud all day and I feel better. Now I am casting about for some way to get an escape in between now and the end of December when my life goes dark again. I wish there was a way to vacation from cancer. I'll have to settle for a vacation from the every day and maybe for a while during that respite I won't be fixated on this cancer.