2026 has been – interesting – so far…
I’m 57 now – so that’s a thing. Three more years to 60, eight more years to retirement. Not that retirement is really a thing for me – I ran the numbers and given my 401K and everything if I retire at 65 I’ll be able to live comfortably for about eleven minutes.
This month I managed to pay off everything but my car. This is something I’ve been working hard on for about a year and a half as I was carrying some debt from all of the bad decisions over the last decade – like the $10,000 I spent on a week long trip to Las Vegas in 2016, the mid-life crisis car – a 370Z Nismo – in 2017, and the $12,000 loss on that property down in Walsenburg in 2018… I’ve been juggling monthly credit payments for so long that not having to anymore is requiring some adjustment… Last payday I reflexively checked all of the various bank websites to see what I needed to budget – and was still mildly surprised to see zeros.
Two weeks ago my roommate finally managed to land an interview with the owner of the psychiatry company that he’s been courting for eight months, and things were starting to look up, then a week ago Sunday he woke up with a severe lack of vision…
I ran him to the hospital downtown that day where an eye doctor checked him out – and the prognosis isn’t good. Something to do with bleeding in the optic nerves.
Since then he’s had a few more medical tests and gotten a second opinion from another optometrist, and his vision is steadily getting worse.
Today he took his truck keys off of his keychain – he can’t drive safely now – so I guess he’ll be selling his truck.
He’s also having a hard time reading anything that isn’t at least an inch tall – so doing IT work is kind of impossible now. So it looks like he’ll be going on disability judging from the paperwork I had to witness for him.
He’s got a disability lawyer involved now because the system is so convoluted that no normal person can make heads or tails of it, and if you’re an actual citizen you need to basically sue for support… Because he’s not an immigrant woman with five kids and has only paid into the system for fifty years, the State won’t even talk to him…
Yeah, I’m a bit cross with the situation. The system here in Colorado is so incredibly screwed up… You spend your life paying for some security in your old age, and they’re so busy downtown spending that money on “free stuff” for votes that when you need it you’re basically told to pack sand.
But – it is what it is. I’m busy enough at work that it’s easy to get my mind off of the complexities of everything right now.
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