I've been in and out, two weeks total in December. At least it's not my heart or anything else serious!
I've been a good boy since my major heart attack a few years ago, and lost quite a lot of weight. After my wife of 32 years recently passed away I decided to get really serious and I started going to my local gym 5-6 days a week for an hour a session. Lost more weight and started feeling 'good' for the first time in maybe a decade! But I needed new gym sneakers, and they gave me a blister on my right foot... which got increasingly infected, despite four rounds of antibiotics. Finally they had to remove my right toe and put me under IV antibiotics, so I wouldn't lose the entire foot. That seems to have worked! I can already walk without pain.
Home and able now to do stuff that I couldn't do for over three months (more like three years, it feels), so I'm slowly getting caught up with stuff for the first time since my wife passed away. Over twenty crates of her stuff all now out the door and donated, another 20+ still to go! A nice 40-something gal has been helping me out and we chatter constantly about AD&D, anime, cats and fantasy stuff. Damn, I'm not looking (yet) for wife #3, but if I was ten years younger, I'd be all over her!
When I was in the hospital, I resolved that I was going to get a few SoL projects cleaned up and posted, asap. I'd posted my True Ghost stuff memories awhile back, but the death of my wife added a new interesting little bit, so I added it to that account. Next, I took a large collection of Reddit DMs about cucking and cheating wives and molded them into a brand new true story of my first wife. It's taken me several weeks to get this account to where I'm happy with it, and it's meant to be a vaguely cautionary tale. Cucking, hot wife, swinging etc is not for everyone. Mistakes were made. Oddly, the Ex and I are rather closer these days, emailing and texting from different states regularly. Almost friends, even. Maybe lessons can be learned and the power of forgiveness is very powerful.
Sitting in a hospital bed being woken up for vitals every two hours, gives you a lot of time to think. My plot outline for the continuation of Bad Prince Charlie had a problem, but I worked it out by brute force while I was bored to tears. Same with some chronology problems in Now is All we Have, fixed and ready to go again. I need first to finish clearing out the late wife's estate stuff... a work in progress, but I can see a window opening to where I can get back to writing fiction again. That would be very, very nice.
2025 has been my worst ever year of my life. Worse by far than the 1987 divorce drama. Wife gets sick(er) first of the year and became a near invalid, she passes in July, August I get this year's flavor of Covid and cough my lungs out for two months, then my toe infects my left and entire foot starting in October. It's now the ass end of December before things in my life started improving, lol. Hoping for much better in 2026.
Alex