In January of this year, after successfully unsubscribing from the Crisis a Month Club of 2014, we began The Year That Shall Not Be Named with hope for the future.  We were getting ready for our daughter’s wedding in June and I was beginning to feel a bit better since finding a dr who understood chronic illness.  However, it was lulling me into a false sense of crisis free security as it turned out to be the worst year in Tabares family history.

In February, a year and a half after we were moved across country for my dh’s job promotion and being praised for his work, he was let go because “It just isn’t working out.”  Truth be told, it wasn’t working out for my dh either.  He had endured racial slurs and filling three positions in the company (his old, his new, and one in between he had taken over when his former boss was let go).  It came right after he was finally allowed to train someone to offload some of his additional work.  Like RIGHT after she was trained.  It came without warning. It came without provocation. It came without severance or boxes or bows.  

The rest of the year frankly was a blur. It was spent looking for work and working on three small businesses to try to make ends meet.  I’m sorry to report that things didn’t work out as well as we had expected on any of those fronts.  The job front had comments like, “sorry but they hired someone with less experience so they could pay them less” or “you’re overqualified.”  Our real estate investments helped keep us afloat until HUD became more and more difficult to work with.  After my left hand was disfigured in a car accident in 2014, I had to relearn how to type.  When I was finally able to do so, I found that my Art of Eloquence website was not only outdated, but my shopping cart was corrupted and didn’t work and play well with JoJos.  It took me months, but I finally re-designed the site and have been working on a relaunch.  As if looking for work and running two businesses weren’t enough to handle, we began selling (Grape Stuff) physical products on Amazon just to keep things interesting.  That has been a whole other adventure and all kinds of entertaining.    

Our daughter’s wedding in June was beautiful and we welcomed a wonderful son-in-law to our family.  Unfortunately, just after getting home, I began showing my age.  All I did was stretch my right arm up.  I heard a crack and began a brand new 7 month journey of pain that apparently damaged the bursa, became bursitis and quickly turned into Frozen Shoulder.  As luck would have it, we had no insurance coverage since the job loss so we had to wait until we could get other coverage before I could see a dr.  I’m currently in physical therapy under the direction of the head physical terrorist.  I wrote about my experiences on Facebook recently and they can express my frustration as well as anything: 

“Whoever called them Physical Terrorists was right. Mine has a nice warm smile and asks me to relax while she’s RIPPING MY ARM OUT OF ITS SOCKET!”

“Making real progress on my shoulder! The physical therapist says I’m doing really well gaining back some of my range of motion. They have gone pretty aggressive with my therapy of late. HURTS when they do it, but it’s working! My Heil Hitler has morphed into a gesture somewhere between that and Horshack’s “Ooooh! Oooooh!” from Welcome Back Kotter.”

“The biggest problem and source of pain now is that the muscles in my right arm felt unwanted and took an extended vacation. I’m now working on gaining back the strength I lost over the last seven months. I have home exercises to do with a large rubber band, I call Rudy.”

For the first time in my entire life (and yes that’s a loooong time), I didn’t spend Thanksgiving with family.  Everybody say “awe…”  We just couldn’t afford to fly back.  Thankfully, a new family we met at church was going to be alone for Thanksgiving too and we spent Thanksgiving with them.  Thanking God for their family as they have been such a blessing to our family since moving to the Indy area.  

Finances being what they aren’t, it didn’t feel like Christmas for us this year.  We weren’t able to get gifts for our extended family or exchange with each other.  We didn’t feel like decorating the house until a few days before Christmas and we hadn’t shopped for our son til a couple days before.  His gifts got here the day before Christmas!  Whew!!   Thank you, Amazon Prime!

The brain fog thing has really been an issue of late.  Here’s something I posted that might help you understand: