Train Wreck

The old saying is that when it rains, it pours. I have a somewhat pithy rejoinder to that: Who says this is rain?



My desktop system contracted some sort of electronic indigestion a few days back. I screwed around with it for most of an afternoon, but when my Internet connection went belly-up I threw up my breakfast my hands and took the magic box to Stone Computer. That was three days ago.

In the intervening time I got out my laptop, which is actually a transportable and serves as a desktop replacement, fired it up and discovered (the hard way) that a few keys on the keyboard no longer performed in their primary office. Okay... what next?

I got my Christmas present early, a notebook with enough horsepower to serve my modest needs very nicely and a keyboard I could live with. Merry Christmas! Except I can't get it to connect to my wireless router, and there isn't a hard wired network card in it. Damn, and double damn. So it's back to Stone, where the little weasel connects just fine. Okay, back home to fight network wireless router compatibility issues.

 

Meantime, Centenarian is back in Hospice and this time it looks worse than before. I'm interrupt driven, trying my best to support Main Lady and her little darlings. Ding Bat calls in the middle of all this and bends my ear about DC Law and his latest escapades. DC Law is halfway between regular hospital care and the ICU. He's been undergoing chemo therapy for the usual reasons (not just for the hell of it) and has caught some kind of mystery bug. The local medicine man has him on three different antibiotic IVs. DC Law doesn't feel well and refuses to allow Ding Bat to head North to the Gravel Pit to help out with Centenarian. That leaves Flopsy and Mopsy, Cottontail having her own problems with work and Que Bee One. For all that she's headstrong, Cottontail is failing to put her foot down when she should.

So time goes by, and now (today) Centenarian is doing a lot better, but that's still a real relative condition. Centenarian requires 24 hour care, and Main Lady can't manage on her own anymore; she hasn't got that kind of physical strength. Main Lady is looking at three options, in order of preference:

1. Centenarian remains at Hospice until she wakes up on the wrong side of the lawn. The thing is, we don't know if Hospice will have her. She may be judged too well (or too lively) to stay at Hospice.
2. Centenarian returns home and Main Lady hires nurses and such to help care for her. The trouble is that this is pricey and you have to hire and watch the nursing staff. Some are unbelievably good, others are mediocre and some will drug you and extract your gold fillings while you're passed out.  Question: Have you ever met a con man you didn't like?  Yeah, me neither.
3. The last option is to find a nursing home for Centenarian, and to that end Main Lady went out and interviewed with a home nearby.  Ten minutes into the interview Main Lady wondered just why some saintly person with a gun and a badge hadn't wandered in, arrested the entire staff and charged them with assault, abuse of the elderly, criminal behavior and resisting arrest.  Main Lady envisions one or more large K9 officers actively and enthusiastically participating in the arrests, aided and abetted by Excellent Rachmaninoff, who has been known to have unfortunate incidents involving teeth in the past.  I'm told the nursing home is a real remote idea.  Remote, as in Los Angeles, California being somewhat remote (both geographically and philosophically) from Fort Pierre, South Dakota.

So I'm a one man cheerleader squad, critter care lackey, taxi driver, sentient adviser and general gopher.  I have questions but no answers.

The good news today is that two out of three computer problems have been solved.  My new notebook computer is now connected to my wireless router.  Since the router is over five years old, the technology inside the notebook would rather ignore the router, as the owner would then be forced to go out an buy a new router.  Connecting the two up wasn't easy, but it finally got finished.  My regular desktop was too sick to be fixed, so the HD was wiped and Windoze reinstalled.  It is now back up and running with a very empty looking desktop.  No, there was no data lost.  You see, yours truly has watched others who have been down that particular road several times, and having seen the disaster and learned how to prevent it, vowed never to have that particular disaster happen to me.  And it hasn't.  I back up my data on a real regular basis.

Now I have to go and walk Excellent Rachmaninoff.