Fifty Freakin' Seven ??!!!!

Nothing says "getting old" like a sudden medical emergency caused by one's own body. Of course, I'm not getting old. I've been old for nearly thirty five years, ever since the spectacular Bicentennial backflip at forty MPH on the cobblestones of Baltimore woke me up to the fact that even if I landed on my head on cobblestones at forty miles per hour, roller skates akimbo, it wasn't going to kill me - just increase my pain. I did get a very cool scar out of it, if that counts for anything.

So now I've had my ass kicked by stupid blood clots. For two weeks I could do almost nothing but lie on my back with my leg propped up, sucking oxygen. For another week walking caused me some diminishing discomfort. Now I feel pretty durn good, but I'm taking anti-coagulants every day for at least six months. Carmen is very hinky about the possibility that I might cut myself and bleed to death. No roller skating on cobblestones!

Every day I still go around the job search merry-go-round, but I haven't seen anything worth applying for since late December. Albuquerque seems to be very hard-hit by what the media call the "downturn" or the "recession." I call it the meltdown. I guess if I were still in Massachusetts I would be in better straits. My friends there seem to be working. Moving to a new and heavily impacted city in the middle of this "thang" was not a good career move for me.

Carmen, on the other hand, is loving her internship, loving her job-search process for the next move, and excited about the future of her ministry. I am an integral part of her ministry, so I am very much involved in all of that as well - and I have lots of time on my hands for whatever she needs me to do: cooking and cleaning, grocery shopping, photographing her church events and creating word and picture documents for her ministerial record, assembling music and burning CDs for her church stuff, reading info from congregations looking to hire ministers and giving my insight into our compatibility with them.

All in all, I'm excited about the future. Even though my employment situation here has been pretty dismal, I've done some cool stuff - background actor on two TV shows, sets for Albuquerque Little Theatre, writing two blogs - I'm looking forward to the next adventure, wherever that takes us. That's what our lives together have long been, a great epic adventure.

So that is the greatest birthday present - the adventure continues! Happy birthday to me.