Saturday, June 1, 2019

A bleeding, itching heat rash … up close and personal.

Happy Saturday, boy and girls. It’s a few minutes before 6 a.m., Sam is out in the woods enjoying his pre-dawn “constitutional,” and I’ve decided to spend some time at the keyboard composing another Howdygram post. Lucky you.



This has been a wild week for neuropathy symptoms around here. So far these include …

MY HANDS AND FEET are “on fire.” They’re burning hot, my toes and fingers are tingling like they’ve been “asleep,” electric shocks are zapping through them, and I’m extremely uncomfortable. It actually feels like I’m wearing tight shoes with skin-tight ankle straps… except that I’m barefoot!

MY TASTE BUDS are all fucked up. Food either: 1) tastes like crap; or 2) has no flavor whatsoever. And both options are completely unacceptable! Even my “go-to” favorites like Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup and Green Giant Steamers Backyard Grilled Potatoes taste nasty.

I’m also having a difficult time SWALLOWING FOOD . This really isn’t as severe as usual, but it’s still annoying and sometimes painful … especially when food gets stuck at the bottom of my esophagus and refuses to move. For hours. Trust me, it feels like I’m having a heart attack!

In addition to all of the above, I’ve also been battling a BLEEDING, ITCHING HEAT RASH on my back, hips, butt and underneath my boobies … the kind of thing that’s pretty common for old, diabetic invalids. In years past I never went into too much detail about this kind of thing, but what the fuck … why not throw caution to the wind. I’m bleeding and itching EVERYWHERE tonight, and it’s driving me insane. The most difficult areas are my back, which is so sensitive to the touch that it feels like a third-degree burn, and under my boobs, which simply feels like shit. My hospice L.V.N. (Leslie) was here on Thursday and slathered me with a miracle cream that’s been known to heal just about everything, and my C.N.A. (Leticia) was yesterday to cover me with a medicated powder. I’m still miserable.

Click here for a detailed explanation of our Shit-O-Meter numbers.



Wow, I’m extremely overjoyed with today’s truckload of free fonts! Each of them is completely gorgeous, and I can’t remember when I’ve ever had so many thoroughly useful scripts, display fonts, traditional sans serifs and playful hand-drawn fun fonts all at once. First, please allow me to offer an honorable mention to “Andes Neue,” a sans serif in four variations with 14 styles of each variation. It’s thrilling!

My favorite fonts today? ALL OF THEM! And I’ve been busy since early this morning (4 a.m.) designing mugs and greeting cards for The Howdygram Store.

In case you want any of these fonts for your personal collection I’ll include download links below the graphic.


Incidentally, if you’d like to prowl the Internet for your own free fonts I highly recommend a visit to iFonts.xyz, the best website ever for premium fonts that cost absolutely nothing. The site is based in southeast Asia, and they routinely give away fonts that sell for huge money elsewhere else. (I’m guessing that a large-scale theft operation is involved.) For instance, the aforementioned “Andes Neue” sells on MyFonts.com for $29 per style, or $1,624 for the complete set of 56 styles. Another fabulous website for free fonts is BeFonts.com, although please keep in mind that many of their giveaways are obnoxious demo fonts with a few missing numerals or no punctuation. (If you don’t need quotation marks or the numeral four, you’ll be happy.)



Here are a pair of The Howdygram Store’s latest coffee mug designs. The mug on the left showcases one of my new free fonts — “Break-a-Leg” — which is mentioned up above in the previous section. At the moment I’ve got another 16 additional mug designs to upload and 33 new greeting cards.

If you’ve never seen my store on Zazzle’s marketplace, you’re missing one hell of a juicy shopping experience. I sell my original artwork on 47 different products; Zazzle manufactures and fulfills the orders. Easy! However, uploading artwork to Zazzle’s marketplace is a slow and time-consuming process that takes about 15 for each product plus … you have to assign each product a unique name that’s optimized for search engines, compose a unique description that’s up to three sentences in length, and create five to 10 keyword tags that will help shoppers find my product. Therefore, those 33 new greeting cards and 15 new mugs will take me about 12½ hours to upload … not counting occasional breaks for meals, an Andy Hardy movie, Popsicles and sugar-free tropical fruit Jello cups.

As a bedridden invalid, this pretty much sums up my entire life.



I need lunch now. Thank you for reading this and please don’t forget to remember the Alamo today.

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