2025 Can Suck It

The BBQ Pit
1

On top of gestures wildly at everything, this year has kinda blown for me.

I developed dry eyes. I’m in pain about 80% of the day, and my eyes have a reading and screen time limit of about 9 hours a day. I work from home, so I spend my entire day looking at screens. I love to read, but it’s incredibly painful to do it- I’ve only read two books this year, as a result.

Our dog, Roxy, went in for dental surgery. She became progressively paralyzed, and we had to have her put to sleep less than a week later.

My wife lost her job about four months ago. Despite her 30 years of experience as an accountant/bookkeeper, she’s had no luck finding anything else. She’s had a few nibbles, but they always seem to “go another way”. Unfortunately, we’re here in Canada on her closed work permit, which expires next November. If she doesn’t get a job and renew her work permit, we’ll have to move back to the US.

Which brings us to the topic of staying in Canada. We applied for Permanent Resident status back in March. At that time, the wait time for processing was about 8 months. Sometime since then, the estimate has increased to 22 months. We have no idea where we are in the process.

And then this morning. My son called me up from Austin, where he lives. He led with, “First of all, I’m okay…” He apparently had a heart attack last night, at age 38. He doesn’t have insurance, or a steady job- he’s been living off of his mother. He had stents put in, and now he’s going to be going onto roughly the same pill regimen I’ve been using this year. I can’t even realistically get down to Texas to see him.

So yeah, I’m so incredibly ready for this year to be over. It’s been the longest decade of my life.

Feel free to include your own rants about this fuckin’ year.

2

I’m very sorry.

2025 hasn’t been my worst year.

3

I wish I could say 2026 looks like it’ll be a better year, but I don’t see any signs that things will improve. With a delusional US president anxious to start a war with Venezuela, and the cost of everything getting higher each day, I’m seriously thinking about heading off to some other country where people actually trust their government. Unfortunately, it would cost every cent I had to leave the US and settle somewhere else, so I’m stuck here for at least another year.

4

Lost my job, lost nearly all savings, two car collisions. I did get a new job so I have that good at least.

5

I work for a large defense company, and in February my contract ended abruptly due to some really bad timing and an Executive Order. Very luckily, (a) I was never laid off, because I was able to pivot to short-term proposal support, and (b) I found a new (and better) job within my company that started four weeks after the previous one ended. Still, that was a pretty crappy and tense month.

In August, my uncle died. He was 88 and had been declining after a decades-long battle with prostate cancer, but the end was a bit sudden.

In September, my dog died. She was 17, and I’d had her since she was 3 months old. She’d been having “old dog” degenerative arthritis and muscle weakness issues, and in August she didn’t rebound from a bout of GI distress and starting rapidly losing weight. Testing – while I was out of town at my uncle’s funeral – revealed that one kidney had shut down and that she had inflammatory bowel syndrome. She didn’t like the prescription food and was clearly becoming increasingly uncomfortable, so I made the impossible decision to let her go. I’m still grieving pretty actively.

Last month, an extended vacation/trip to NJ was cut short when I hit a massive hole on I-78 on the way north: the result was a shredded tire and a stressful and unexpected overnight stay in Allentown, PA, followed by the other 3 tires also being replaced before I drove home. I still got to spend some time with family (including my widowed aunt), which was great, but I spent much more time dealing with the car. Not much of a break at all.

Yeah…2025 can bite me.

6

We started kindergarten this year. We had very high hopes. They are in the basement now.

My substantial support needs autistic boy appears to have severe ADHD, the school is failing him, I don’t know what they should be doing instead. Rather than acknowledge that they misjudged the extent of his disability they are super tempted right now to slap him with a “bad kid” label and blame the parents and it all fucking sucks. I’m not a praying person but it’s sorely tempting because I have no idea what to do.

Don’t even get me started on the dumpster fire at work thanks to Donald fucking Trump. It’s a wonderful year to be a nonprofit. We’re half a million in the hole and it’s 25% my job to fix it (Or 50%, depending how you do the math. We’re 50% grant funded.) It’s so much pressure.

We’ve had some great things happen but I’d trade them all for my boy to be successful and happy in school.