Talk about the month from hell, January was the worst month, so far, of 2026. So many bad things happened. On New Year’s Day, my body decided to have a pooping meltdown. I was so dizzy, then hot, then clammy, then dizzy, that I couldn’t make it out of bed, a new low for laundry day.
Then, six days later, it happened again. This time I made it halfway and ended up on the floor. Plus, my poop was black. I Googled it and discovered it could indicate bleeding, so I called my gastroenterologist, and he told me to go to the ER or come to his office at noon. The ER would take hours and hours, so I went to his office and he put me on the schedule for an endoscopy two days later.
Long story short, I’m fine, no bleeding and no pre-cancer or cancer. What the heck? Was it all the rich foods around the holidays? Was it a touch of Norovirus?
Then my Jack Russell terrier attacked her housemate dog last week and then another dog yesterday, last day of January. I was weeding the fenced front yard in my beach town while Daisy roamed around, after my rejected attempts to play ball with her. An old guy was walking by with his smaller brown dog, and the two dogs were barking at each other through the fence. The man was walking slowly, so there was a lot of time for barking. Then my insane dog climbed up the wire fencing I had tacked onto the wooden slat fence and broke through the rusted top part and was in the street attacking the dog. The man pulled on the harness and now the brown dog was out of it, with Daisy on top of his dog, me yelling and chasing her, the old man waving a towel at her. I don’t know why he had a towel.
Don’t ever try to catch a Jack Russell, because it’s impossible. I chased Daisy back into the yard and shut the gate. The old man hurried away after his loose dog while I shouted apologies. He didn’t acknowledge me.
What the F####? I yelled at my dog as I herded her back into the house. Not enough Prozac? Something wrong with her brain? After all, I’m her third owner, but it’s been eight years and she is mostly a good dog (a couple of brain meltdowns in eight years – just ask Cookie and a dog in the park) .
After two hours of buying those u-shaped nails and unrolling the wire fence that has been in my garage for many years, and taking off the rusted fencing and nailing the new stuff to the wooden fence, my neck and shoulders hurt. I ate lunch and left the dogs out back while I ran errands.
I got home in time to have an argument with my neighbor (we share a driveway). She started it when she mentioned Bruce Springsteen’s nasty new song. I told her he wrote it for the two people who were killed by ICE. She went on about the paid protestors in Minneapolis, to which I said in my tired and grumpy state, stop watching only Fox news. The protestors are angry Midwesterners marching in below-zero weather for free. She went on about how Alex Pretti shouldn’t have had a gun and how Renee Good’s wife was taunting the ICE agents, pretty much that they both deserved what they got. Unbelievable.
I said neither one of them should have been killed, then slammed the gate and went inside.
It’s troublesome that those who have drunk the Kool-aid can rationalize all of this away, half the flipping country.
We cannot lose our right to protest, which is in the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the constitution). Even the NRA has pushed away from Trump’s goons, saying that we have the right to be legally armed in public.
Bad January. I am glad you are over.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 