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This was not a good week for my physical health.  I’d had a rash on my chest by my underarm for about a week which I had thought was just a rash. It started hurting last Sunday night which made me think it was not just a rash.  When I told my GF about it the next day she said it was probably shingles. My GF is a nurse and got her friend who is a nurse practitioner to look at it and she agreed that it was shingles. Although the shingles was annoying and caused me to lose some sleep I could deal with it and work through it.

Tuesday the plan was to get my shingles prescription after I got off work. After lunch Tuesday I started to feel unwell. I ended up leaving work about an hour early and by the time I got home I was sick as a dog. I had a fever, nausea, chills, aches, and fatigue. Looking at shingles symptoms I saw that it could cause flu-like symptoms so I figured that was what I was experiencing. This was worse than any flu than I’d had for many years though.

I didn’t get much sleep that night and in the morning I felt even worse. I decided I needed to tell my GF another symptom I was experiencing. It really hurt when I peed. This is not something you want to tell your GF. 🙂 Since I knew it couldn’t be an STD we figured it must be a urinary tract infection and I started taking an antibiotic for this infection.

Having shingles and a UTI seems bad enough but things were actually worse. After taking the antibiotic Wednesday and Thursday I felt only a little better on Friday. My GF decided I should go to her office so she could run a urinalysis which confirmed I had an infection and that it looked more serious than just a UTI. Her doctor sent me to get some blood work done which confirmed I had prostatitis. I’d never heard of it before, but it is a bacterial infection of the prostate which can be pretty serious. With the new diagnosis we switched to a different antibiotic and it seems to be working.

My theory is that these illnesses all started with my oral surgery a couple of weeks prior. The dentist prescribed me a steroid to keep the inflammation down. One side effect of the steroid is that it can weaken your immune system. Apparently, it really weakened mine. When I have my dental implants done later this year I will be sure to let them know I do not want to take a steroid.

Although I was off work three days I didn’t get any blogging or much of anything else done. I felt so bad I all I wanted to do was sleep or sit on the couch and watch TV. Now that I’m feeling almost normal again I should have a better week this week.

Since this is the last day of 2014 it is a good time to look back at 2014 and determine what went well and what didn’t go so well. I’ll start with what went well since I’d like to see the positives first.

Finances
This was a good year for me financially. I was able to max out my IRA and also put about $10,000 in my savings account. 2013 was my highest income year ever, but I think 2014 might have beaten it. Although my income was still fairly modest it was easily enough to support my spending habits and I didn’t have to worry about having enough money during the year. That is a big improvement from just a couple of years ago.

Travel
I was able to do a fair bit of traveling. I went to Las Vegas twice and Cancun once. I also went on a two-week hiking trip on the Appalachian Trail and had some shorter trips on the Katy Trail. I also earned a Southwest Airlines Companion Pass and have a stockpile of about 60,000 SW miles to use for travel in 2015.

Fitness
I was able to lose thirty pounds this year and win my Healthy Wage bet. When I made it down to 196 I did feel better and my clothing was loose. This was the lowest weight I’d been for a couple of years and the first success I’d experienced losing weight for several years.

Of course, there was also some things that didn’t go so well. Although I managed to lose thirty pounds this year overall I didn’t really improve my fitness. I’ve gained back twenty of the thirty pounds I lost. This is a result of going back to my old eating habits. I need to start eating better in 2015 and losing weight again.

Writing was something I was terrible at doing this year. I had writing goals for monthly goals several times this year and I don’t think I made any of my writing goals. There is a lot of room for improvement here. I don’t think I’m going to bother setting writing goals anymore. I need to just write.

I also regret cutting my A.T hiking trip short and not finishing the Katy Trail. I need to get better at dealing with temporary discomfort and sticking to my plans.

Overall, 2014 was an okay year. If I stick to the goals I’ve set for 2015 it will be a great year.

You may know from previous posts that I have a trip to Cancun with my girlfriend and my mom planned for Monday. As preparation for that trip I got out my passport Thursday afternoon to add my passport number to my airline ticket reservation. I was dismayed to see that my passport had expired in September.  My first thought that was that there was no way I could renew my passport in time to leave on Monday.  This was a major bummer to say the least. Since it was already Thursday afternoon, I basically had one business day to get a new passport.

After doing some internet searching through Swagbucks I was somewhat relieved to see it is possible to get a passport in one day.  I first tried to get a passport using RushMyPassport.com.  I hated the idea of paying $350 plus the $170 in passport fees to get my passport, but it was better than the alternative of having to cancel my Cancun vacation. After filling out my passport application online , printing off my airline ticket confirmation, and going to get my passport picture taken I called RushMyPassport to get a letter of authorization per the instructions on their website.  Unfortunately, when I called them they said they wouldn’t be able to get me a passport in 24 hours and it would be Tuesday before they could get me a passport. Since they weren’t able to provide me they advertised and I paid for I canceled their service.  Getting the passport on Tuesday wouldn’t do me any good. They promised to refund the fee to my credit card. I’m hoping that they honor that promise. I’ll share how that turns out.

Now I was despondent once again.  A little more internet research showed that it might be possible to get a passport in one day at a U.S. Passport Agency. The problem there was that there are only 28 of these offices in the country and none of them are very close to Kansas City.  It turns out the closest passport agency to KC is in Hot Springs, AR.  It is kind of strange that Hot Springs,a town of 30,000 people, has a passport agency.  The other passport agencies that were within a somewhat reasonable distance to me were in Chicago and Dallas. I looked into flying into those cities, but the last-minute fares were too high and I wouldn’t get there early enough to make an early morning appointment. Hot Springs was my only hope.

I called their automated reservation line and managed to make an appointment for 9am on Friday.  By the time I got all of this done it was a little after 5pm on Thursday. I called my girlfriend and let her know we needed to make an emergency road trip. Luckily, my girlfriend is cool and didn’t freak out about the situation.  It was about a seven hour drive to Hot Springs so we needed to get on the road.  It was about 2:00am by the time we arrived in Hot Springs, checked into a motel, and got to bed.

The next morning I arrived at the passport agency about fifteen minutes early for my appointment.  It took a couple of minutes to get through security and then I was able to meet with a passport agent after waiting just a couple more minutes. The agent was very nice and it only took about five minutes to go through the passport renewal process.  She told me I could pick up my new passport at 2:30pm.  I was momentarily frightened when I heard “Tuesday” instead of “2:30.”  After she repeated the time, I was greatly relieved. I left the passport agency office at about 9am which was when my appointment had been scheduled. The expedited passport renewal process was extremely efficient.

I returned at 2pm to the agency to pick up my passport.  Although the passport pickup form stated to not arrive early to pickup your passport I decided to see if my passport was ready after noticing other people entering the agency. I was in luck and was able to meet an agent immediately upon entering the office and she had my passport.  I was extremely happy to receive my passport and know that I’d be able to go on my vacation.

If you need a passport in one day it is possible if you go to one of the U.S. Passport Agencies.  Some of them require proof of imminent travel and there is no guarantee that you will be able to get an appointment though.  It is much smarter to check your passport ahead of time so you don’t have to get a passport at the very last minute like I did. I’m incredibly lucky that I checked my passport when I did or it would have been too late. If I had discovered my passport was expired on Friday I wouldn’t have been able to make it to a passport agency in time to get the new passport. The whole ordeal of having to drive seven hours each way, get a motel, and being stressed about whether I’d actually get the passport or not could have been avoided if I had just checked my passport when I booked the airline tickets.  If you have any upcoming international travel make sure you have a valid passport.

If you have been reading this blog for a while you might remember a post I wrote back in 2012 about being an extra in the movie, “Devil’s Knot” and meeting Reese Witherspoon.  I’m not very good at tooting my own horn because the movie finally came out in May of this year and I’m just now getting around to writing about the release of the movie.  I also thought I had previously written a post on how to get a job as a movie extra, but I can’t find such a post.  I’ll be writing a post on that topic soon.

When the movie finally came out I was pleased to see that I had some camera time. Although, I was right next to Reese Witherspoon in a couple of scenes I still wasn’t sure if I’d be viewable in the movie.  The scenes I was in could have been cut from the movie or cropped so that I wasn’t in the scene or I could have just been so far in the background or the scene shown so quickly that you could barely recognize me. As you can see from the photo in this post I got lucky and have a scene that basically features just me and Reese on the entire screen.  I’ve been an extra in a couple of movies before so I know it isn’t usual to get a scene where you are seen with the star.  In the other movies I worked as an extra on I was either totally unseen or only visible for a brief moment in the background so I’m pretty happy that I had such a highly visible scene in this movie.

If you want to check out the movie it is on Netflix right now.  I used my phone to take a picture of the movie playing on Netflix on our TV for this post.  My most visible scene is at about 1:21 into the movie where I can be viewed sitting in the courtroom next to Reese Witherspoon and then standing by her in the hallway a short time later. I’ve also been able to spot myself in the background a few other places in the movie, but I doubt anyone who doesn’t personally know me would be able to spot me in any of those scenes.  The movie is a dramatization of the trial of the West Memphis 3.  If you aren’t already aware of this case it is a pretty interesting story.