They Can’t Take Away Our Memories

I know that most of us are feeling the pinch of this economy. As for my family and I, we have felt it for a few years now. Most know that Tom is partially disable due to injuring himself on the job which led to spinal surgery where they put titanium clamps to his spine. That surgery led to him having congestive heart failure, kidney failure, pulmonary embolism (blood clot to his lungs), hematoma from the intravenous needle to his right arm (the had to due surgery to relieve the pressure which left nerve damage), and having a vena cava filter inserted in to his jugular vein in his neck (while he was awake) to catch blood clots before traveling to his lungs which he will have with him for the rest of his life. This all happened within days of his spinal surgery. It was a nightmare. He will never be able to do the job he did before his injury. Now he is doing desk work which doesn’t pay as much and much less than his job before his injury. We have learned to adjust to less money, but each year it gets harder and harder to maintain what we already have in today’s economy. Everything has risen in price from our health insurance, food, taxes…It just goes on and on.

This is our pool before the economy tanked.

This is our pool now.

This is what has become of our pool. Last year we didn’t open it and this year we knew that it would be tougher to get up the money. We don’t foresee things will get better for us to afford such a luxury. Our pool was becoming a frog pond, and a mosquito magnet due to lack of financial maintenance. We had it filled in with five (dump truck) loads of dirt using our income tax return.  Bye, bye saving!

It is so sad, to us, that these are the results of the financial hardships that we have come to know.

We have been busy moving the rest of the dirt by hand. This weekend we are going to plant grass seed where the pool was.  We have a lot to do.