Let's try again

It's been a couple of years since I touched this page. There have been a few things going on that I could not, or cannot, bring myself to talk about. Painful family things. I have often kept a journal and have not really even touched that even. This will be my attempt to catch up on some things.
One of the dominant things is my health. Right now I am on a steroid to try to heal my back. I am praying that this round of meds does some good. We cannot afford to go further in treatments. I have a small tear in one of the disks in my lower back. One little tear that causes me exquisite pain. Of all things, my chiropractor got me in to see a pain specialist, who ordered an MRI. This led to an avalanche of problems setting up.
So, first up is to try to cheaply and easily alleviate the tear. At night I take 1600mg of Gabapentin, plus half a dose of Ultram, and a muscle relaxer. Sometimes this helps. I get more sleep with this combo than otherwise. Nothing worse than being up all night with pain, then trying to carry on a halfway normal life in the daytime. It wears you down. Now I have even more sympathy for when Kim had two disks blown almost 20 years ago. He had to have cages put in to replace the disks. We had insurance back then. Not anymore. That is a long story that I will not get into because it leads to finger pointing and hurt feelings. I have learned to just let that go.
No job because the oilfield crashed in an unprecedented way this year. We are two years too young for Social Security or to start drawing from our 401's. Kim has applied for unemployment, but that branch of the government is just as screwed up as the others. We got 4 letters in the mail...two for each of us. One letter said we qualified. In the same envelope, another letter said we didn't make enough money to qualify. What? How is that even possible? Without going into details, that is totally impossible. Of course, they do not answer their phones at the unemployment commission. They have an automated system that sends you down a rabbit hole. Kim has not only faxed a letter to them, but for a month, takes the time to dial the number 20 times or more. Every day for a month! They refuse to answer the phone. Guaranteed that if he spoke spanish, they would answer. The incompetence is astounding. Luckily for us, Kim had been saving some cash over the past few years because he had a bad feeling about things and tried to prepare. I have no clue how we are supposed to last for two more years on this stash, but that is what is expected, I suppose.
Anyway, that is the tip of the iceberg right now. I need to work on inserting pictures into the blog and relearn how to use it. On top of that, they want to change everything. So Old Dog, New Tricks. Ugh! Sometimes I hate technology. I need to go sew and escape from the world. Lord knows I can't buy any clothes that I need, so to the sewing machines I will have to turn.

Ahhh...a picture loaded! This is a ring I had made before everything went to hell in a handbasket. I love how it has a Medieval look to it. It is white gold. The blue stone in it is a blue star sapphire I got when I was 15. You can't get them anymore. To each side, in a gold cage surrounded by wee diamonds, are two Thames River garnets. They were sent to me by a wonderful man in London, Simon Bourne, who picked them up on the foreshore. They are not native to that area, so no one knows how they got there. But being as a tidy sum of my heritage comes from there, plus that is my birthstone, they are very special. They are rough, not cut, thus they are in gold cages. I am very pleased with how they turned out. A matching pendant is being made with the remaining garnet that I will post a picture of when I get it. My last hurrah from when we had an income.
Anyway, now I will see how this looks posted and work on tweeking it to be more readable. Thanks for looking in on me. I will post more later. I have thought about this blog the past couple of years and needed to revive it. Here I am.
Stay tuned.