Middle-Age Miracles

Miracles of My Middle Years

By the time most people hit 50, they probably have a fairly settled, predictable life.
My own life, since age 50, has been one "miraculous" surprise after another!

This blog is my celebration of all the ongoing blessings -- miracles! -- in my life,
and the journeys proceeding to, and issuing from, each miraculous blessing.

My Home

Thanks to the rapacious and incompetent scoundrels on Wall St. crashing both the prime rate and the housing market in the early 2000s, in 2011 (the year I turned 50), my husband and I had the chance to do something we could never do before: buy a home of our own.

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We've been here over seven years now, and done a lot of upgrades in that time -- not just one but TWO new stoves, first a cheap electric one to replace the old, dying gas range that was already here, and then a much nicer smooth-top range to replace the cheapie; a new water heater, to replace the truly ancient one that was slowly losing its ability to do anything useful; a new dishwasher this past summer, when the original one, also quite old, stopped being dependable, and just last month, we replaced the entire HVAC system -- last year, we required a $300 repair on the 20-year-old AC, and we knew it was past time to simply replace it; when the estimator came to have a look at it, we learned that the furnace was also rather old, right at ten years -- so we replaced the whole system.

It's a really good thing I've quit smoking; this home-ownership thing is expensive!

Vaping

A TRUE MIRACLE!
I wanted to be a non-smoker for the last 30 of the 39 years I was a smoker... but after trying and failing 4 times, I gave up any idea that I would ever be able to quit...

THEN VAPING HAPPENED!

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My Cat(s)

In 2011, while we were busily searching out a home to buy, a pitiful, starving, flea-infested tuxedo kitten found her way to our carport... and into our hearts. I'm terribly allergic to cats so I never had one, but nowadays, there are 24-hour antihistamines that are truly miraculous! Come meet our sweet Tuxie...

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Another Cat... or Two

Our son decided that since the 24-hour antihistamines I take were handling my allergy so well, it was time to add another feline to the family -- enter Annabel, who joined our family in May 2018, adopted from the county animal shelter.

Yet Another Miracle!

Yet another miracle, to me, is the smart phone. Yes, I'm aware that they've been available for quite some time, but I didn't get my first one until May 2016.

That first one was a very small and inexpensive Samsung, called the "Core Prime." It was very slow, and didn't have much RAM at all, but the reason I got it -- to enable me to read eBooks -- didn't really demand too much in the way of resources. But it was very small -- with a 4.5 inch screen, it was somewhat like trying to read a book written on gum wrappers!

So, six months later, I got a larger one-- a ZTE 6-inch "phablet" -- and for reading, that huge screen was terrific. However, if I was on the phone for any length of time, I really felt the down-side -- that thing was HEAVY! Still, I really liked it for reading, and I don't talk on the phone much, so I put up with it. Until one day when it was trying to update some of the very few apps I use, and it ran completely out of 2GB RAM!

Clearly, that was intolerable -- but finding an affordable phone with more than 2GB RAM wasn't easy... until I found that one you see to the left, and said "Hello, Moto!" It has a 5.5-inch screen, nearly as large as the ZTE's, but with 3GB RAM, and it's a GREAT deal lighter -- it's perfect!

Some Background...

I used to run a vaping-related website called AngryVaper, but I took it down sometime in 2015 or 2016, when I became completely disenchanted (infuriated!) with my webhost -- Arvixe -- due to them billing me two weeks early, and with that premature billing, costing me an additional $35 for the overdraft that the premature billing caused. I was with that webhost for several years, and until that time, I was fairly happy with them; their customer service wasn’t great, but their servers were fast and their prices weren't unreasonable. However, billing two weeks in advance of the due date is so completely unprofessional, I saw no option but to simply stop being their customer, and since, at that time, I was still trying to figure out all the technical ins-and-outs of vaping, I really didn’t have sufficient time, energy, or motivation to devote to the website.

This was the graphic at the top of the AngryVaper site, in case it jogs your memory:
(I also use a version of this graphic at the top of my Facebook page.)

Vaping is not a crime - former site header

Recently, I became quite involved with the website Quora, and realized how much misinformation and disinformation about vaping is still out there, which desperately needs refuting with FACTS, so I began to feel the urge for another vaping-related website.

But I also realized that I have a lot more blessings in my life than just vaping, and I wanted to highlight those other blessings as well.

Long before I ever started the site AngryVaper, I had a web design/template site called CrypticSites, which provided free templates for Joomla! content management system (and briefly, templates for the dot-Net-framework CMS called MojoPortal), but as internet technology has advanced, I’ve begun to see that such sites are somewhat obsolete nowadays -- this site, Middle-Age Miracles, is created with a free online website creator, and with more and more such site creators being available, I saw no particular future for creating Joomla! templates. I also became increasingly irate at all the little pissant hackers who would try in various ways to destroy my work, and as a single individual, I had very little recourse or means of discouraging them; hopefully, the admin of Weebly (the site creator/webhost this site is using) have better means of discouraging and deterring the pissant hackers.

All the "miracles" specified on this site are truly that, to me -- miraculous! By far the most miraculous is being finally able to quit smoking -- that would be a huge blessing to anyone who achieved it, but in my own case, after 4 failed attempts... it truly IS a miracle, and achievable ONLY thanks to vaping.

That's the primary reason for creating this site -- to refute all the "public health" idiots who speak only LIES about vaping. Every one of us who have managed to quit smoking thanks to vaping has to speak up, to repudiate corruption, lies, and greed which do nothing but add to all the many deaths from smoking.

I DON'T CARE if those corrupt states that sold tobacco bonds go completely broke -- it will serve them right, and I hope their citizens rise up and send those greedy, despicable crooks to prison, for gambling with the lives of their own citizens -- that would truly be karmic justice.