A Quick Recap of the Past Year or So

 The past couple of years seems like a blur as I begin to recall them. 

I'll start with when I decided to stop all my meds except for my antidepressants. I was so sick of all the needle sticks and side effects, and this was the early days of the pandemic when doctors' offices were becoming empty and I hadn't had any communication with the doctor for many months.

I can't recall the details at all, but things seemed fine as far as I could tell.

Around [?] the same time Massachusetts legalized cannabis and I started consuming it as an adult recreational consumer. That was when I decided to lose weight. I was around 220 lbs and the extra weight was causing me serious health problems.

I decided to cut out all the junk foods I'd been eating. The chips and diet coke and so many other snacks needed to go. So that's what I did. I limited my 'snacks' to saltine crackers (with natural peanut butter / salsa). Water became my main drink of choice. I started losing weight and it continued until 2021 when my skin started itching all over and I was turning yellow (which I didn't notice for quite a while, then ignored foolishly). An acquaintance finally persuaded me to go to the doctor about it and that's when we discovered that I had a big problem with my liver. It had clogged up so badly that doctors had to insert a couple of stents in my bile ducts so [it] could start draining and we could start eliminating all the bile salts in my skin that were making me itch.

When they did some scans to see what was going on they discovered that I had pancreatic cancer (stage ll). At that point, I was getting close to my weight goal but suddenly dropped another 10+ lbs. I eventually started chemo and continued that for 5-6 2 week cycles. Chemo was rough, the nausea/sweating was overwhelming during the in-hospital chemo sessions and they couldn't fix it with other drugs.

Then one night I woke up to go to the bathroom. At the same time, I was having a stroke but I didn't realize it. I went to call for help later but the wireless pendant I'd been given couldn't connect... I ended up calling for help using my landline. Fortunately, the stroke was on my non-dominant side and 6 mos later I've recovered *most* of my capabilities but I've lost fine motor control of my left hand and also most of my (former) musical abilities, including thought and vocalizing (and of course guitar fingering).

The stroke was evidently caused by a blood clot caused because the lack of pumping strength of my heart which is around 30% of normal and atrial fibrillation (and something about a hole in my heart that should have closed up as I grew but didn't). There's also a possibility that chemo weakened my heart further.

I had stopped chemo because of the side effects and thoughts of long-term damage ruining any quality of life during the 2-5 years I possibly have. I had decided to go ahead with surgery, but because of the stroke that was not possible. It's still not possible because of my heart issues (ongoing treatment to strengthen the heart muscle). So I'm in limbo right now.

A couple of years earlier I'd gotten my medical cannabis certification. Cannabis has helped so much. During the chemo (at-home) I found that I didn't need to take most of the anti-nausea medications I was given. They were successfully replaced by cannabis for easing both nausea and the lack of appetite.

All this happened in the middle of an ongoing pandemic. As far as my former medications go, all the diabetes meds are no longer necessary as my A1c is back to normal. The medication for acid reflux that I'd been taking for 10 years is no longer necessary and the only meds I'm taking now are Lisinopril, Atorvastatin, Ecotrin, and Paxil (and of course dry vaped cannabis).

Weight chart from MyNetDiary

If you look at the current part of the graph it shows that I've maintained my weight between 155 and 160 to this day.

I believe that cannabis has helped me to maintain thoughtful eating habits, and (mostly) keep my mental health stable throughout the pandemic and the insane political climate both here and abroad.

That's enough for now. Next time I might get into my recent embarrassing freakouts on Twitter. I need to familiarize myself all over again with Blogger so it doesn't take me so long to use (like inserting photos/video).

- Thanks for reading

This IS a Threat

I swear, one of these days I'm going to come back here and actually write something (and then you'll be sorry).

Does This Thing Still Work?

In case you haven't noticed I haven't been around my blogs for quite a long time. 
What's that? You hadn't noticed? You're just here by accident or maybe you're simply clicking/tapping around one of my bios somewhere on some neglected profile page...

Well fine, no worries. I just wanted to say that I see that some blog-cleaning is in order before I start posting again. Things need to be updated here (kinda like your vacation cabin that's been sitting untouched since before you took that spontaneous road trip, went hiking, hit your head, got amnesia, and spent a couple of years wandering the woods of Maine until you woke up and realized that it was all a strange dream). Or WAS it?
Outdated magazines, stale crackers, and the refrigerator needs a hazmat team...

Still, the part about things needing to be updated is all too real. Websites listed that I no longer read or don't even exist anymore, and software that's been abandoned or I've stopped using. Like that family of red squirrels that have taken over the pantry, they need to go. 

Too ManyDead Brain Cells Are Not Conducive To Good Writing

Wow this is hard..

It's 10:00 am on Saturday morning. I'm starting to put together my first blog post in two years and I'm sitting here with a brain feeling like it's filled with molasses. Thoughts that should flow, or at least dribble out are only coming out in slow sticky drips.

This is not new by any means. For years now I've struggled during the process of writing.
Losing thoughts or my entire train of thought as soon as I encounter the next descriptive word that's playing hide-and-seek with my brain, or being unable to remember how the punctuation or grammar should go.

Part of the process to deal with this has been going into the thesaurus and searching through sometimes multiple (here's a good example of struggling for a word that should take seconds to decide on but may take 5-20 minutes now, and may lead to me forgetting what I was originally trying to say. "tangents" is the only word that came to me but I'm sure that there's another word that's much better, that fits what I'm describing. What I need is an app where I can describe what I'm trying to say and have it produce some choices for me. I seem to recall something like that where you could type in some words and it would kind of distill your input, hopefully providing the word or phrase you were looking for.). See what I did there? In the process of trying to explain, one thing led to another, and the next thing you know 30+ minutes have passed. 
Tangents was an appropriate word. I want to go from A to B but along that path I end up taking multiple side trips, and when searching for words in a thesaurus the words are all hyperlinked so I might open up multiple browser tabs from the original word, then the same thing can happen from any one of those other words. To make it more distracting, sometimes I just get interested in some of the other words I encounter!

Now many writers will not worry about fine tuning things in the first draft and just concentrate on getting their thoughts down without restricting the flow. In my case I would likely never get back to finish them because I can't follow any structured, organized schedule. I've learned that the way I get things done (when possible) is to complete them in one shot, and if that means working on a blog post all day & into the night that's what I have to do. The times I do end up working into the night have a way of ending sloppily though. Fatigue sets in and that's that. It would be so nice to be able to pick up where I left off the next day or even have multiple projects going but these days I consider myself fortunate to even feel like writing (at least more than 140 characters at a time).

Writing, in part, has been a way for me and so many others to achieve a small level of control during stressful times. My need for things to be correct, lined up and in order detract from that control because I realize that my writing skills, specifically my grammar and punctuation (and likely other areas that I'm not even aware of) are sloppy and are much lower than I would like them to be.
I simply have lost the ability to learn anything new (and retain it) unless it's something I can apply on a daily basis, and since there are very few things I do regularly these days learning new skills is rare.
It would be so helpful if I had someone to proofread and edit my writing, however ever since my father, then mother died within a short time of each other, I have lived a very solitary life and do everything alone. The whole technology revolution (at least since the desktop computer & Internet) has been something I've tried to learn on my own (not having any 'tech' friends that I could ask questions or collaborate with). I did fairly well keeping up with most of the advances and even authored a consumer-level security (alerts & advice) blog in a section of my local paper the Concord Monitor. But things like recurring depression and family matters started eroding my memory and intellectual abilities to the point that I wasn't able to do all the work necessary to keep up with all the news.
Without having someone 'live' to ask questions to about punctuation or grammar (as opposed to websites like "Grammar Girl"), or someone to check/correct things, I kind of just ended up doing what I can with what I've got.

I almost completely stopped writing anything for a while during the time of their deaths. I was diagnosed with Diabetes, Sleep Apnea and a few other things. Those things, combined with pre-existing mental health and neurological problems, all the medications and their side-effects, along with the physical effects of disorders like apnea, high cholesterol and diabetes have had over the years, conspired to starve my brain cells of oxygen. 
Lately, while my diabetes and cholesterol is under better control than it has been in years, the Sleep Apnea has increased to a scary level. My brain (and other organs) is being starved of oxygen at night and the daytime starts out with me being very spaced out, not getting much clearer over the day.
It's now 1:41 pm and as I was writing that last sentence my mind just took another trip into the void for a few seconds..

Despite all that I somehow wrote these 955 words in the last four hours..

I will try to do better than one post every two years. Next will be a new post over at The Chesterfield Dispatch (with lots of photos and possibly video in the future!).

Thanks for reading.

Oh Microsoft, why do you...(& why can't you, why don't you) - aka; The ongoing struggle to get and/or understand Msft "help".

To start with I want to say that Microsoft is far from the only one that makes using their software harder than it has to be, but they do it *so* well..
                                   _______________________________________

Today I was getting caught up on my email and was reading a SANS newsletter that included an entry:

Title: Microsoft reissues windows patches that previously caused blue screens

Description: Microsoft released updates to patch 2982791 to resolve the
bluescreen issues.  Microsoft strongly suggests all customers uninstall
patch 2982791 and install the updated patch, 2993651.

Reference:  https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms14-045.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2982791

                                   _______________________________________

- So, I look in my installed updates and I see both. "updated patch, 2993651" is installed, and "patch 2982791" is also.. 

My first question is: Is there a reason that MS automatic updates didn't uninstall "patch 2982791" before installing "updated patch, 2993651"?

Then I read through the MS reference information related to the issue..
Instead of clarification what I find is more confusing (and conflicting) information.

In the "Update FAQ" section it says: "Customers do not need to uninstall the expired 2982791 update before applying the 2993651 update; however, Microsoft strongly recommends it.
Customers who do not remove the expired update will retain a listing for 2982791 under installed updates in Control Panel."

And in another area is the boilerplate: "Most customers have automatic updating enabled and will not need to take any action because this security update will be downloaded and installed automatically."

Tell me how Automatic Updates helped me in this case..

                 

OK, so I am a 'customer who has automatic updating enabled...' and as so; "... will not need to take any action because this security update will be downloaded and installed automatically.", right? (underline added by me)

"[...] will not need to take any action [...]" 

-- OK fine, but what about where you say "Customers do not need to uninstall the expired 2982791 update before applying the 2993651 update; however, Microsoft strongly recommends it."  (underline added by me).

If you 'strongly recommend' it then why didn't you do that as part of your "automatic" updates?
If there was some technical reason that precluded doing that you don't mention it, neither do you say anything about whether or not to uninstall 2982791 if, as in this case, it's still installed after the 2993651 update.

You say "Customers who do not remove the expired update will retain a listing for 2982791 under installed updates in Control Panel.", but nothing is said about any issues that may arise as a result of leaving it.

It just doesn't make sense to me that you would make such a "strong" recommendation yet leave customers like me hanging like this. On the other hand it hardly surprises me, and one more time I'm left cursing Microsoft.