Rant #3,159: All I Need

How many more days are left in June?

When will this month finally end?

I keep asking myself that, because the worst month of my life still has a few days to go—

And I am wondering what else is going to happen to me, will fall apart, and will not work anymore.

The latest item on the June 2023 casualty list is my computer printer, which gave out yesterday afternoon as I was printing out a story that I had just edited which I will probably send to my work today.

The printer took in one page after another, and after printing out the first page as it always does, it wouldn’t print anything out afterward.

I changed the ink cartridge, plugged and unplugged the printer several times, but lo and behold, the printer apparently does not work anymore, so I sunk about $100 into a new one, and it is on its way.

Hopefully that one will work, but at this point, who knows?

(Incredibly, the computer itself, which I thought was a goner a long time ago and still shows signs that it will be leaving us soon, has withstood this month, and actually started up fine today.)

What more can go wrong here this month?

I have no idea, but there is definitely a black cloud over my head and over the heads of my family that simply won’t go away.

We hired a plumber to fix the downstairs leak, and he will be coming on Thursday to do the job … so another several hundred dollars will literally be going down the drain on this job.

(And as an aside, do not use that fixit site that they advertise on TV, which is named after a woman’s name and starts with an “A.” Very highly priced, as far as I am concerned—use local people to fix your home problems.)

So I see that today is June 28, and then Thursday will be June 29, and then Friday will be June 30, and then this month will be in the rear view mirror for good.

What a horrible month this has been for my family and I!

My mother is doing as best as he can with the situation that she is in, and she is in the “comfort care” portion of her life now, where we, the nurses and the other people we have coming in each day are simply trying to make her comfortable.

It is a tough job, but she is not ready for any hospice care.

Her vital signs are those of someone half her age, and she just keeps on ticking and doing what she can do, which isn’t much, but it evidently could be a lot worse.

She sleeps a good part of the day, but her heart is healthy and everyone says that she is really doing quite well under the circumstances.

She eats, she can handle short conversations, and she is generally friendly to everyone who comes into the house to help her.

It is tough on me monitoring her as if she were an infant—and helping her when she needs help, from giving her a drink of water to I think you know what—but it appears to be working to the extent that it can work with someone at this stage of their lives.

I have no idea how long this can and will go on, but right now, at least, everything seems to be OK—not great, but OK.

My wife is progressing nicely from her head injury—the incident that kicked off this month of horror—but she does get frustrated that she doesn’t feel 100 percent herself on most days … but she is doing quite well based on what could have been.

My new car is something I really cannot fully enjoy yet, because of the circumstances surrounding my getting it … and the 72 months of exorbitant bills I will have paying it off.

It is just another bill added to the load my family and I already have, and since I just have this at-home job and Social Security—and my wife hasn’t worked in a month due to her own injury—it is really, really difficult to survive, but we are doing it, because we have to.

Everything is on our heads, but we have strong shoulders, so we can bear it all … but up to a certain point.

When we will get to that point is the million-dollar question, and I wish I had a million dollars to answer that question for myself, but honestly, I not only don’t have that type of money, I have nothing—

But I do have a very strong and caring family, and maybe that is all we will need to get by one crisis after another.