The last couple of days have been harder than expected.

On Sunday, the heat at the house went out and through a slow, expensive process of elimination, it was determined that the gas pipe into the house had been compromised. Water got into the line, which stopped the gas.

It’s been a long, anxious week of sitting in my bedroom, huddled around a space heater with a couple of dogs.

Workmen have been around the past few days, but I’ve managed to get out before they’ve arrived or after they’ve left to do train one place or another.

I haven’t run all week. It’s been damp, windy and cold. Others fare pretty well in that stuff, but when it stops being fun for me, I tend to bail. This week, my choice would have been to run in the cold, the rain and the dark. I just wasn’t going to do that.

And everybody hates a treadmill.

It’s been a sobering week for me, too. I went back on blood pressure medicine after being off the stuff for six years, but the doc said if I lose a few pounds, I have a good chance of getting back off it.

A lot of my weight gain has to do with being lazy about what I eat, but that’s correctable. I just need to be honest about what I eat and pay attention to what goes into my food diary. The rest takes care of itself.

And the blood pressure medicine arrives at a good time. It probably made dealing with the stress of another massive repair bill easier to take. It also probably made me a little more resilient to the news that some of what I do has become obsolete.

Since the newspaper cut out the entertainment coverage a few months ago, people have continued to pitch me stories. They still have shows. I kind of missed the work and thought that it was needed, really.

I offered to write some of the things I used to write about local arts for free. We could call it a public service.

The paper declined and told me the number of online hits didn’t warrant those kinds of stories. They just didn’t generate much traffic and they gave me some numbers to compare.

The people interested in the kind of things I’ve usually written probably already knew about them. So, it just didn’t make good sense to put energy into doing those kinds of stories unless I found some really novel idea that would catch everyone else’s attention.

That’s reasonable. The newspaper is a business and provides a service to its customers. You have to give the people what they want and what the people want isn’t local theater or a club show, apparently.

And to be fair, members of the local arts community have never made it easy on me or themselves. How many of my stories did some asshat just take a picture of the newspaper article and post that on Facebook instead of sharing a link?

I can remember at least three examples of that in the past couple of years.

Before that, how many people lifted the text from the article online and posted that?

I called a couple of people out. I don’t think any of them took it down.

I get it. Nobody wants to pay for anything. So, you get what you pay for eventually, and ultimately, that’s nothing.

But the dismissal hurt. Being told that things I care about, things I’ve spent years writing about, don’t really matter all that much was hard to take. I didn’t deal with it well.

The blood pressure meds probably helped.

But I don’t know what to do going forward. Change is hard.