An explanation and an apology

[Bill Murray]

Some of you may have noticed lately that I am somewhat "off" in my postings here. Certainly my friend Hanno has suffered through a number of situations with me such as posting 5 PMs to try to get a web site address to him. I have been guilty of many similar lapses of proper syntax, grammar, spelling and of course my dumbness in figuring out who posted the pics Hanno led us to on the thread on the Ford engine pic request. Very embarrasing to me and about the third one on as many forums in as many days.

OK, to the short strokes. About 2 1/2 months ago during a regular medical checkup it was determined that my blood pressure had gone from borderline "bad" to borderline "this is getting ugly" around 190 plus a bit against a normal 120.
So, the sawbones put me on a very aggressive regimen of drugs to get the numbers down. One of these drugs has a list of side effects that almost equal a book but I fell victim to only two of them. One is a persistent dry cough which occurrs every couple of hours and lasts sometimes for 15 minutes or so. Uncontrollable, can't stop it. This is, as you can imagine very debilitating. It takes energy, nothing comes up and you feel trashed after an episode. Happens day and night and I average about 3-4 hours of sleep a night, fitful at best.
Next and worse issue is general fatigue. I am constantly on the verge of exhaustion which is of course made worse by the coughing spells. Both problems are well known and documented side effects of this drug. I went to the Doc Tuesday and we are trying to figure out an alternative course of treatment.

To try to lighten this up, not only do I screw up my posts here and elsewhere on a regular basis, I do all kinds of other dumb things. Two examples, today, I inserted 26 checks (Thursday is check posting day) backwards in their window envelopes and sealed every bloody one of them. Did not realize the mistake until it was too late. A couple of weeks ago, I put about the same number of postage stamps on the envelopes not only upside down but on the wrong side and did not even realize it until the employee who had post office duty called it to my attention. Never realized it.

Another effect is short term memory loss or misplacement. I can read a thread here, go to make a reply and completely forget the key words or issues I was going to respond to. This has a rather nasty effect at the store and I have to be careful when talking to customers. My employees are all clued in and make allowances if I forget what they just discussed with me five minutes earlier. Does make for interesting days sometimes.

Enough of my problems.

Cliff, thanks for sharing your situation with us/me. You seem to have a handle on your situation but please allow me to say I am truly sorry anyway. Not slobberingly sorry, soberly sorry and I wish you the best. I particularly am with you on the issue of sharing what you have with the rest of the community. All of our lives are finite but most of don't know what it seems you know.
I have had PMs with several members of this board on the same subject but more dealing with my age (64) my earlier knowledge of potential heart problems and of course the ever present prostate gland monkey (Yup, got that monkey too and you never know) I salute your dedication to get as much as you can out there. Source material such as exists on your alblum site, the non public archived stuff anyway, is just going to disappear someday if it doesn't get out there as you are doing it. Even the public archive materiel is at risk as govournments continue to have to tighten their belts and eliminate such services to their publics, so the AWM for example, may one day just disappear due to lack of funding.

Well, enough babble. Hopefully for me at least I will get some new wonder drug to arrest my dumbing down. And......no sympathy wanted here either. Umpty eleven years of coffee, cigs and scotch take their toll. I ain't complaining.

To you, Cliff, may I offer the following:



Your friend, Bill