What a Year End looks like for me!
This is going to be very disjointed; I keep saving a bit, then having a kip and then coming back to it, I just hope this makes sense as my brain seems to be enjoying a holiday in the sun somewhere else in the world, hopefully the Maldives
In some respect, things have been improving, I can walk small distances and I am generally not as sick as I have been in the recent past, still no food or drink though, but it now seems to be all catching up with me to give me a good end to the year, I am now being isolated in my office due to other having tested positive for Covid.
I cannot afford to get this bloody Covid stuff, I have managed to avoid it to date, so I am spending the next two weeks at least, which is the Christmas period basically shut away from others, which is great for me – Not!
I have an office chair at least to fall asleep in and a TV to watch rubbish on, and I a lot of cleaning up and organizing to do that would keep me busy at least, but Christmas dinner has apparently been officially frozen and I will not be going downstairs this year for nice meal and good company, this year I am stuck in a workshop, wrapped up and trying to stay warm, which is a bit of a joke. Yes this will be a great Christmas, maybe a sign of things to come.
I would love to know how anyone is meant to survive of Disability on the Isle of Man, I get a whopping £440 every 4 weeks, so how do others pay rent, heating, and food, etc., I cannot do it, we still have not replaced the Gas bottles, they are wanting over £200 for a gas bottle, which I used to get for just £100, even that is a lot when you normally need one 3 times a year, it certainly is a bit depressing sometimes, I am at least glad that I do not eat and drink, at least all that arrives on the doorstop in the form of bottles of horrible looking liquid that looks like liquid mud, and if I could taste anything I am sure that it would taste as much too.
Radio-wise I am not doing too much at the moment either, I have collected quite a few nice items to start restoring and I just need a bit of space now to allow me to do this. I was hoping to add a couple of items to the Shack pile, but I may have missed out on these now, I have a few items on the ever growing wish list which seem to be hard to locate, I am still in two minds as to what to do with regards to sort out a tuner, I was offered recently a big Palstar Tuner which would have done the shack well, but the person has not got back to me which is a crying shame, they also had a good sized working Linear that I could have really found a use for, so I am back on the hunt for those items now.
I have been a year back now from Clatterbridge, and things have not been too improved as such, everyday pops by but in general you are left to your own devices and every day that passes is just another wasted day, nothing changes, and all that seems to happen is that I fall asleep earlier than most days and I can see that I am turning nocturnal again. But all days seem the same, nothing really happens, you have not got the energy to do too much, and you are basically left alone to do what you will, I used to have visits from the nurses every week, and now I am back to being basically normal, I don’t get those visits, What they assume is normal is person dependent on a PEG for food delivery, Meds that have to be delivered at set times between 6am and 10pm and through the day, It hurts to talk, but I can crock a bit, it hurts too, I still need a wheelchair, and I am so far from normal, yet you are treated by all as a pathetic mess, which by they, I do actually feel like one most of the time.
I think most would term the way that I feel, most of the time as depression, I do not feeling this way, I have recently been made the acquaintance of a really great radio amateur based in the UK, he keeps telling me of some of the great old kit that he has in his collection, he has also hinted that if I was mobile that I could have had some of his collection to look after but a lot of his gear is not boxed and therefore he will not send, and thus this is just one of the great reasons that I have for hating myself at the moment, I don’t have the strength to last more than an hour or two at a time, even small jobs such as sorting out the routers around the house which all had to be changed to except the new rules on the Cisco backbone which also had to be sorted out, a new layer 3 switch managing each floor, 1 new Cisco router managing the traffic for the Internet, and all then talking to the Checkpoint server that controls all of the VPN’s and Tunnels for the house network, all would have normally been a simple 2 hour installation at the most, now, the same job has taken me weeks, I still need to reconfigure the routers that also handle Quality of Service’, the two main switches are working right but the routers that handle each floor seems to be handling the tunnels weirdly, something that I could have normally sorted out fast if not instant, now, I just cannot concentrate on the command line cofig of the routers, I have obviously set up something wrong and just cannot see it at present, It is nice having challenges to push myself each day to get back into this, but it all nearly became a cropper when I updated the Astero servers downstairs, each little job is now so alien to me, I use to be able to read a Cisco’s command line like a good book, now simple lines of text can confuse me for hours, my head is not up to speed yet, I am just worried that it never will be.
It is a strange life now, I feel dumped upon, as in my life is now dumped upon, you work most of your life taking the wrong and right directions, I have had a bloody good life, not many will have enjoyed a start like I did, it has had good times and bad though, and it was going really well up until this bloody cancer messed up everything, the road back to normality is not a good one, there must be an easier way, but I suppose for other I will carry on, at least for another day…
