Well, I managed to make it through the weekend. Saturday was a very nice day. Except for the fact that I don't think my son actually fell asleep at nap time, but was just very, very quiet in his room for a couple of hours.
Oh well, it worked out in the long run. I did manage to get in a wonderful ride both Friday and Saturday evening. Friday I rode almost 3 miles in about 20 minutes and Saturday I took the long way up to the shopping center, did a bit of shopping and rode back, for about a 20 minute ride then as well.
Saturday was also Quakertown's Arts Alive festival downtown. Boo and I went there after we did the laundry. It was a good bit of fun as alway. I purchased a mug for my mom within about 5 minutes of getting there. It's this awesome dark green mug that looks somewhat like leaves and has this handsome frog perched on it near the lip on the one side. Of course, I couldn't hold on to it until Christmas, and gave it to her yesterday. She loved it. I'm glad she did. It was worth every penny, just because it's a mug, and a frog and fun and especially because it's hand made. I love hand made things. They're so much more special than any old store bought, mass produced thing. Hand made things have souls.
Yesterday went both better and worse than I'd expected. It went better because Dad had managed to plug in the docking station and I only needed to rearrange a few things. (That is, plug the printer and mouse into the dock instead of the laptop, hence the whole idea of a dock...) For some reason the games that come with Windows 7 weren't installed and I have no idea if they have a disk or where it would be. So, I did a quick search and found a nice, free, online solitaire game and bookmarked it for Dad, putting an icon on the desktop as well.
The bad part is the fact that the router died. This threw people into a panic and I had to spend a little time troubleshooting. Thankfully I was on call this past week so I had my own laptop with me. Once I found the control panel I was looking for on the new computer and verified that the NIC was working, I tried my own computer to verify that it was the router that had a problem, not the laptop. It was the router and about an hour or so later it totally died. (Thankfully it only took about 5 minutes on the phone with Verizon to verify this, they amazingly didn't have me do a million stupid things, and Mom and Dad should be getting a new one tomorrow.)
The other bad part happened while Gak, Boo and I were at Trader Joe's before going home. (Boo hadn't napped so we really wanted to get home before dinner time, so that if he did nap in the car, it wouldn't get in the way of bed time...) The computer apparently started acting up and got real hot and Mom had to hard boot the thing to shut it down. So, of course we go over there and end up eating dinner there after I check out the computer. Yes, it was still a bit warmer than I'd expect after being off for 10 or 15 minutes. No, I couldn't find anything wrong and it stayed fine for the next hour or so. But, even small things get complicated these days.
Yesterday was obviously not a great day for Dad. We had the same conversation about the router being dead about 5 times in 4 minutes. He honestly didn't remember just having it. I just went along with it though and was patient, but not patronizing. He also couldn't remember where or even when he'd got the computer or if it had been paid for etc. I just reminded him gently of what I could and brushed aside other things. It hurt to see him this way, but this is the new reality. And this will be the new reality for a while (who knows how long) and then we'll have some weeks that we think are just "bad weeks" and then we'll all realize that it's the new reality. It's painful for everyone involved. This isn't something like heart disease or diabetes or something like that that mostly hurts the person suffering from it but can go unseen by most everyone else and they're unaffected by it until the very end. Nope, this monster affects everyone in Dad's life. Yes, mostly him, but us too and in a very personal way. By the time this monster rears it's ugly head, there is no more quiet lurking in the background. Everyone close to the person with the monster knows it and has to fight it. Not fun. Not fun at all.
Anyhow, PopPop had a very nice time with his grandson and I managed to ensure that the laptop is up and running and spend a bit of quality time with my dad myself. So, overall it was a good day, even if it wasn't quite as smooth as I'd hoped, but smoother than it could have been in many ways.
Oh, I do have the rest of the pictures from April and the handful of pictures from May off the camera and edited. But I'm too tired to be creative with captions and upload them to Flickr. Maybe tomorrow. Hopefully tomorrow. I've got a lot of things to get done between now and Sunday.
Peace to you all and may your weekends not be too gray and your time full of quality.
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