Leibniz Standing!

Backblipped January 2014

We must have done a rat photo shoot today - and Leibniz was clearly trying to make a good impression as a model! He's a hooded hairless rat - so his underlying colouring is that of a hoodie (dark head and shoulders, with a dark stripe down his back), but it's hardly visible unless he gains a little fuzz!

Anyway, this blip marks the end of 3 years of blipping. Although I still haven't completely uploaded all the photos from the end of 2012, they are all ready to go, and I'm catching up fast (January 2014).

The end of 2012 seems like a lifetime ago. 2012 was such an awful year for us that when we got to the end of it we really did just sit and say to ourselves "Has it stopped now? Is it safe yet?".

2012's experiences included: deaths of Dexter, Smudge and Pebbles (cats), breaking of old car, borrowing to buy new car, crashing of new car 10 days after we had it, cutting off of my benefits so our finances started to fall to bits, me with a bad back, blocked ears, oven broke, Mother-in-Law with lung cancer, then brain tumour, then finally dying in June, Wonderspouse having a breakdown, me getting a virus that almost saw me hospitalized and kept me from doing anything much for over 4 months, breakdown of relationship with my father, near bankruptcy, housework stopped completely, weight steadily increased so we were both obese and my blood results (glucose & cholesterol) started to become really worrying, and so on and so on and so on...

Things continued in a similar vein during the first half of 2013, but have since started to improve. We're not properly back on track yet, but we're getting there. I'm not fully-functioning yet, and we have a lot of catching up to do (not just with blip) and a lot of sorting out of some of the devastation caused by the last few years, but, with a bit of luck, we'll manage to rebuild our lives over the next couple of years!