Well, now that the summer solstice has come and gone the days are getting shorter again. It sure seems like the days get shorter a lot faster than they get longer after winter sets in. It was a tough weekend for me last weekend. Not just because I had to do a major upgrade on Sunday morning (always nice to work for free on Sunday), but because my trackball’s scroll wheel stopped working.

This may not seem like a big deal, but, man, as Joni Mitchell sang, “… you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” It was beyond annoying to have use my keyboard arrow keys or grab the scroll bar and drag it down. Thanks goodness for Amazon – I ordered a new one on Sunday morning and damned if it didn’t get here yesterday.

Every time I want to disavow myself from all things Amazon, they drag me back in again.

I’ve also had a ridiculously sore neck for the past couple of weeks. Not the normal annoying pain that I’ve become accustomed to in various parts of my body (either individually, or in concert with one another), but a super pain in the neck that’s forced me to sleep on my back with a heating pad wrapped around my neck.

And of course in this nanny state we live in, the goddamn heating pad shuts off after a while, so I have to keep on restarting it (good thing I don’t actually sleep much). Plus my ear bud cord gets all tangled up with the heating pad cord which (because I tend to toss and turn a lot) gets wrapped around my neck.

Every time I have to get up to take a leak (which, fortunately, is only about 27 times a night), I damn near strangle myself.

The worst part about the neck thing is that it hurts to look down, meaning I can’t sit outside and read for very long, which is about the only thing I like to do these days after work (especially now that Game of Thrones is over – can’t believe I have to wait another year for that to come back).

And then yesterday my seemingly never-ending foot issues resurfaced, so I’ve been hobbling along like a 90-yr old man. So even if I was able to sit outside and read, the walk back and forth to refill my beer would be intolerable.

I always knew that getting old would suck, but I didn’t know what a maliciously sadistic process it would be.

On the bright side, I’m taking next week off (first week I’ve taken off in, I think, a couple of years), and if things stay quiet at work, I think I’ll take Friday off to make up for working on Sunday. So that’ll be good. Until I have to come back to work again, at which point I’ll feel like cutting my throat.

But no meat pie for me, thanks.