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Monday, July 11, 2005

Still Ticking

I've got this post to write and it's been on my mind heavily for the past few days, but I'm not really sure exactly what it is that I want to say or how to say it. You see, today is my one year anniversary of my liver transplant, a very special day for me, as I'm sure you can all imagine. Pretty amazing really that I am still alive at all when I actually was expecting to die well over a year ago. I was recently shown several pictures of what I looked like when I was probably near the lowest point of my health. I was quite shocked by what I saw, my face was horribly sunken, skeleton like, with my skin very dark from the poisons flowing thru my veins via a dead liver and a far away look in my eyes from being nearly totally incoherent of my surroundings.

I won't post those pictures, they are too horrible to look upon, they make me gasp when I see them and there is no way that I could allow anyone else to see them outside of my close family. And then I look at myself in the mirror today, one year later, my health has nearly fully returned and I look like I once did. I'm strong and vital and capable once again, with only several minor limitations on doing the things that I loved doing for so many years before. But, I still cannot return to my former trade of being a mechanical technician for fear of minor injuries that could easily lead to infections because my immune system is suppressed with life giving drugs. I still love repairing things and I probably always will, but I have now taken to fixing things that are far less dangerous.

Most of you by now know that I am currently a student for a webmasters certification course, this is something I really enjoy doing and I hope to make a decent living at it in the near future. Building blog templates is making very little money, but, at this time it is my only income besides social security disability checks that I receive monthly, I can't wait though till I'm able to make enough money from my new chosen profession to be released from the monthly dole. Hopefully, I can get a decent job doing commercial web design, although I love doing the blog templates they do not pay near enough money yet to make any kind of a living at doing them. The blog work though, is and has been an excellent learning experience for me, thanks very much to everyone that has employed me to do their templates in the past 6 months!!

Of course, all of you are very special to me, I started this blog in November of 2004 when I was still barely able to crawl out of bed and turn on a computer, I was still very ill, much less able to sit upright and type and read and blog. I stumbled upon blogging quite by accident, having heard a celebrity on TV discussing "blogging" and I had no idea what the word meant. A Google search quickly led me to Blogger and I found all of these wonderful diaries, your own free website!! The rest is, well, history! Yes, I was a total novice just as we all were at one time, I used to do quite a bit of website and html work many years ago before my extreme illness but most was long forgotten since. It has been a struggle to relearn what I once knew fairly well, and back then no one even used css in websites yet, it was just barely emerging.

I guess what I'm trying to say is thanks to all of you for being so kind and thoughtful and coming here to read my silly shit and helping me to regain my mental and physical health by just being yourselves and leaving so many wonderful comments. And taking the time out from your daily grind to make me feel wanted and useful, you all have no idea what it's meant to me during my recovery. Of course, I have met a few assholes along the way that have nothing better to do than try to spoil other peoples fun and sometimes they were and still can be the most fun to deal with! Hell yes!! hehe

One thing that has amazed me that I haven't told you all about was the fact that the church my mother goes to has been saying prayers for me for the past couple of years every Sunday. I'm not a church going person at all, I was raised Roman Catholic but I turned my back on organized religion when I was very young for personal reasons, it's not so much that I don't believe, it's more along the lines that I do not and can not believe as they do. To be very general about my religious beliefs, I'll just say that I have my own religion and I am very thankful for everything in my life, I certainly have no reason to complain! However, they recently decided that they needed a new website and my mother mentioned one day that they were seeking volunteers to create it.

I volunteered immediately and took the project headon to show my appreciation for their concern and well wishes, thoughts and prayers. I didn't realize at the moment just how much work it would involve but I am very glad that I did it and I understand that they love the site very much and appreciate all of my hard work. Anyone interested in seeing it, please go to: St Martha Church. It's over 20 pages strong with lots of photos and links, a very comprehensive site and I'm very proud of it! Go take a look if you would! There are still a few pages under construction but only because they have not given me the information needed to do them.




Along those lines, I've made some very minor changes to my Blogs Gone Wild! site and completed a couple of new templates with even more in the works! (forgive me for linking to it so much, every time I do so it helps to raise it's standings in the search engines, LOL) One is called A Veracious Blog, written by a guy from Texas! I used an image of an actual Texas lighthouse to make the background from, go give him a shout if you would. The other is called Fancy Footwork, written by one cool lady who is a bigtime pet lover, you can see images of all of her pets in the header itself. I have a couple more that I'm currently working on and I love it when my creative juices are flowing, I just sometimes wish I could get some of my "other" juices flowing more frequently LOL!!!

So, to sum it all up, Happy 1st Liverversary to ME!!!! WOOHOO!! damn, I feel older than one years old!! Hugs and kisses!!!