I’ve been a little absent from the blog for much of the last 2 weeks, and there are good reasons. We received a settlement from the social security admin, a real surprise, but so very welcome. As a result, I’ve been really busy. Paid off some $5,000 worth of bills, got rid of loans and credit card balances, and purchased a lot of things, some of them toys, that I’ve wanted for a long time. Changed from cable to satellite for TV (Directv, really great), got a satellite XM radio, and finally a new computer. The old one was in really bad shape. The new one, an “Emachines” model T4010, made by Gateway, has a Celeron proc, 2.93GHz, RAM 512MB, lots of extras, really nice. But changing over is really a lot of work and very time-consuming. I took the HD out of the old one, set it up as a D drive, and am slowly copying what I need from it to the new one. Since there are a lot of things I do not want, I’m not just doing a “copy*.*” so the way I’m doing it takes time.

The settlement I received was for my disability. I’ve been disabled since 1995, but the SS folks gave me 1998, don’t know why. Then they gave me back pay, but not all of it. OK, I’ll take what I can get, there’s not a lot of choice. It will be great, though, to have the extra monthly check. For so long, we’ve been struggling, having to borrow and scrape to make it from month to month, I just don’t know what it feels like to be worry-free. But it will be nice to find out. Oh, and we’re finally gonna go on a cruise, one thing Nurse Jenny has wanted to do since we got married. We’re just trying to figure out which one, there are so many to choose from!

Friends, rejoice with us in our good fortune, and thanks for being friends!