Here’s hoping for a much more prosperous and all-around BETTER year ahead in 2009! We cannot actually ask for a more EVENTFUL year than 2008, just looking at the past few months alone. There are those who might argue that point. Well, each to their own, I guess.

I have had an extremely rough time the past few months trying to find something to write about. From local to national news, politics, etc., everytime I get just a kernel of an idea developing, WHAM!, that whole idea is already obsolete, replaced by something even more extraordinary or off on a completely different story altogether. It would almost seem as if I have found a different variation on the definition of “writer’s block”. Contrary to my usual assumption of that describing a situation where one cannot seem to come up with ANY suitable subject matter, it always seems as if I have WAY too many things going on in the old noggin’ albeit too finite of an existence at the same time. That is partly explainable by recent circumstances.

I was recently involved in a “near death” experience, although I didn’t know it at the time. I was helping a guy out in the cleaning of a MacDonald’s in Arcata one night. He was getting some stuff done on the roof. There was a ladder going to the roof and I passed up a lot of his “tools of the trade” including a metal spray canister holding perhaps 2 or 3 gallons of liquid; everybody’s seen such a thing, right?

Well, we were getting ready to go inside and were getting our stuff down from the roof. I was on perhaps the third or fourth rung from the bottom of the ladder reaching up to get a hand on whatever was coming down. Then came the spray bottle in question. It was perhaps a foot above my hand and I was trying to call up to say that it needed to come lower or I needed to come up a bit higher when I noticed the bottle falling straight towards my head. In just a fraction of a second, my reflexes kicked in (not my mind, apparently) and I had two hands up to fend off that bottle. I believe I succeeded, although I cannot be sure as my very next memory was lying on a gurney being pushed through some hallway somewhere.

To make a very long story shorter, I was in a hospital where I stayed some six hours (I remember about 10 minutes) before being airlifted to San Francisco, some 300 miles away. I was to stay in the medical wing of UC San Francisco for some five days before they finally relented and discharged me. After everything was all said and done and I was back in Eureka, I found out that I had had what they called a “sub-arachnoid hemorrhage” which is quite often fatal. It was the result of a head injury. Most of the above-mentioned hemorrhages are occasioned when there is a bursting aneurysm and it’s usually fatal IF it is not discovered in time and neurosurgery performed. When I looked it up myself, there was a lot of very grim stuff about it, but almost as a footnote, there is a mention of head trama as another cause IN RARE CASES and it seemed to be implied that all of the other grim stuff mentioned might not apply in case of head injury. It had me going until I settled down a bit. Then I saw my doctor – “I can’t believe you’re still walking around under your own power”.

Bottom line: I had a fall, apparently, and hit my head. I landed up in a hospital for several days where I was advocating my release every day until it worked and they let me go. I felt banged up a bit, but that’s about it. My doctors all were not betting on the chances of my survival until I did just that – survived!

I am perfectly okay now. There are those who would perhaps argue that point. My doctor released me to go back to work a few weeks ago and I am doing just fine, except for a loud, persistent ringing in the ears that I hear non-stop – all day – every day! I do get some respite from it when I sleep – thank God I CAN sleep. Anybody out there got any miracle cures? I do have an audiologist appointment within a week and a half or so. I just hope they can actually DO something.

In the meantime, I have a LOT of time on my hands. I am not working as things are now very slow around here work-wise. I just filed for unemployment. I have watched a LOT of news since before election day. I really don’t want to comment on ANY of it. It’s all been just TOO much!

To fill in my days, I recently started online courses at the University of Phoenix towards completing a BS in Information Technology. I have used computers virtually all of my life, but I have never earned a dime from them – it has all been a “hobby”. That’s going to change in the near future. There is a warning there for those out there who might pay attention to such things (like Michael) – my first class is “Keys to Professional Development” which includes a lot of lesson material (and assignments) on things like “critical thinking” and “writing mechanics”. Watch out! I might very well improve things in my life like literacy, for example. Ha!Ha! We’ll see what it looks like from hindsight, okay?