No, my wife didn’t run off and my dog didn’t die. But, last week was a different kind of tough. The week before, I was dealing with the side effects of chemo and being a full time caretaker. But, we were mostly at home and sheltering in place. Last week as there was more getting out and about, it seemed like everything was going wrong.

My wife likes to say that I am ‘a glass half empty’ person. I don’t really think so. I like to think of myself as analytical and balanced. I like to see the full spectrum both good and bad. I suppose that to people who don’t like to see both sides, that is construed as negative. I fail to see how always being positive even when the odds seem low is a better trait that viewing the whole picture optimistically.

I say that because I am not complaining. I am going to get to a point by the end today. I think helpful advice is that we cannot change or dwell in the facts. My wife has cancer and we are doing what we can to combat it. All the ‘why me?’ in the world isn’t going to change a thing. It does however make life much more complicated.

This process is moving at an extremely disjointed manner. One day chemo is scheduled every other Thursday, then it is every other Friday. Take this medication before chemo, no don’t take it at all. Come in for this reason, no see this specialist. They are still doing diagnostic testing for goodness sake to determine if they are proceeding in the correct direction. Every conversation is musical chairs in who is running this process and is this information actually correct. This is the background for what I am dealing with.

Then, my son calls and says ‘my car has a problem’. He is about 45 minutes away. So, I have to drop what I am doing to go get him at 10pm. Due to a large coolant leak, I decide the best coarse of action is to have it towed home rather than risk a warped cylinder head. Imagine that I am trying to get my wife ready for an all day procedure that she is extremely nervous about while dealing with the tow truck driver at the same time because the car is locked and twenty minutes from the hospital.

The next day, my SSL certificate updates for altf4.co. Every 60 days this happens. But, it also follows with calamity. It seems like every time I go in there the user interface changes and I struggle with this process. I have come to anticipate the suck, but it does make it frustrating. This time I could not get the DNS provider to recognize my security documents. I tried and tried until I finally broke down and reached out to support. The problem was technical, I am not sure that there was anything I could do.

I was trying to setup my walkie talkies so that I could give one to my wife and I could hold onto one. This would give me some freedom to be out and about the house but still be in communication. This was the whole reason why I went through the licensing requirements that I talked about last week. One of them I couldn’t get to work. I bought new battery packs, I swapped batteries, no go. Finally, I took it apart to find some of the internal components fried.

No problem, I will break out my second set. They are not doing any good squirreled away in my emergency box for years anyway. One battery was dying, so I ordered new battery packs. Low and behold, there are a lot of aftermarket batteries that are similar but not the same on Amazon (even with the same battery model number). So, now I have two new batteries that don’t charge in my radios since I already opened them and threw away the packaging.

Last week it felt like everything was an obstacle. Everything I did had unintended consequences and nothing worked as planned. But, I want to go back to the beginning here. First, I don’t know what God has planned. I also know that I am handed scenarios that I can handle and learn from. As I am writing, things are getting better. My website is running, the batteries are cleared up, the problem is diagnosed with my son’s car and I think we have all the testing done and the path is clear on chemo.

More so than that, when things are not working right we just have to compartmentalize and be objective. Most of these things were not life altering problems. Take the problems and triage, then prioritize the work to solutions. The list might get longer before it gets shorter but we have to focus on the important things first.

End Your Programming Routine: To be truthful, I wasn’t exactly happy while all of these things were going on at the same time. But, being able to step back, it wasn’t huge problems. I suppose it is fortunate that more bad things didn’t keep happening at the same time. Mostly, step back and analyze the problems to the best of your ability. I am no electronics expert but I can see and understand burnt capacitors, Time to cut your losses and move on.