The up and down year of 2025 is almost over. I hope yours was a good one. For me, let’s just say I survived it and am grateful for that. Here are the highlights.
HEALTH-**I fully recovered from the detached retina surgery of my right eye that happened on 12/23/24. Dr. Aaron Weinberg who is my surgeon and retina specialist has been nothing short of incredible! I was off 6 weeks on disability pay then 2 months later had a procedure done that greatly reduces my left eye’s retina from being detached.
**In mid-February I got my first ever case of COVID. Three days later I was fine.
** In early-March it was a kidney stone that sidelined me. Oy! I expelled it a month later and have been all good since.
** My arthritic knees went through a series of gel injections this fall and they’ve been a relief. However, I need to lose a lot of weight before having knee replacement surgery.
SCHOOL-** The 24-25 school year was a challenge with nine different high school students on my caseload being sent to other schools due to off their chain behaviors and problems. Due to a staffing need, I was relocated to teaching middle school kids which was familiar territory since my first five years at this school were spent teaching middle schoolers. That’s fine by me. I like high school kids but fretting over their daily drug use, vaping and cell-phone smuggling make for major headaches.
HOME-**I got a new central air conditioning unit installed and it worked perfectly throughout our hot summer. The rest of my nearly one hundred-year-old house remains in good shape.
SUMMER- ** The summer swim season was a great one and a huge relief after such a hard school year.
** The WLS AM 890 Reunion in late July was a big highlight too!
IN MEMORY OF… **In 2025, I attended the last rites/services of five people I knew. Sadly, two of the departed took their own lives at ages 61 and 36.
MOVIES & MORE.**It was a horribly weak year at the movie theaters. I loved the Springsteen film “Deliver Me from Nowhere.’ That one was so compelling, I enjoyed it twice. For a truly frightening movie, “A House of Dynamite” was fantastic. This nuclear scare film was in theaters and then ran on Netflix and it’s intense.
** More better features in film and documentaries were found on Netflix and HBO. The Charlie Sheen docu and the one on Billy Joel being two great ones and the one titled “John Candy- I Like Me: was top notch too. Theeight part Ed Gein mini-series was wild. And the seven-part HBO’s FBI drama “Task” starring Mark Ruffalo, had me eagerly waiting for each new episode on Sunday nights. Someday, Ruffalo is going to win some serious acting awards.
** The WGN Morning News kept up with playing the music video parodies created by me and Al Flash. That side hobby remains one of my favorite things to do.
**RAISED ON THE RADIO UPDATE- My media memoir has been through its final edit and now I need to find the right people to help me self-publish it on Amazon. To put it bluntly, the missile is in the silo and it just needs to be launched.
!! Like I said, 2025 was survived. Still here, happy to be healthy and better for overcoming what I faced while fully aware that tens of millions of other folks had a much worse year than mine. Here’s to wishing for good things in the New Year for all of us.
Happy New Year!
Mick Out
