getting old

I wake up thinking that I could go work out before my day's duties. But I don't. I do get up pretty early, though. I take the kitchen trash out to the garbage can FFP put out. It is raining hard enough for an umbrella when I do this. I chop vegies for Dad's deal and put them in Tupperware. I shower and dress in cotton slacks, a cotton shirt, loafers. I work on my journal a bit.

Then I go to Dad's church. I pack up my deviled eggs and my chopped vegies, a platter and go out there. He's already there and has put out cake and pie and cookies and dip and grapes and strawberries and plates and stuff. We get it arranged and I have some myself and then I join a word game with three women. I don't win, in fact I come in third. It's a pretty fun game, though. One of the ladies has peripheral neuropathy and today she's have a time of it, her hands shaking so hard she can't hold onto the tiles. She wins the game of course.

When it's over, Dad encourages people to take some home and has even brought ziplock bags to further encourage it. One lady with a cane wants the leftover pie and cake but needs help getting to the car with it. She has some health problem that causes her legs to swell and is in a lot of pain.

Done with that, I go to Fry's and look at stuff and buy some labels to fix up for Forrest to use for address labels with his return address printed. I wander around looking at computers, accessories, software, books and toys. Then I walk by all the gee-gaws in the checkout line, avoiding buying candy or DVDs or toys. Others in the check-out line seem equally serious, buying blank CDs, printers, add-ons, monitors, those plastic things that allow chairs to roll on carpet.

Home again, FFP says that the AC guy (who is his cousin) had to get a part for one of our heaters but first had to go eat lunch with his brothers. (Other cousins of Forrest's who are our lawyer, handyman and electrician.)

I call my buddies about dinner tonight but no one is in and I leave messages. I decide that I need to see if I can make one of these ancient laptops that I have serve as an Internet access for us in New York. The hotel I've chosen for our trip claims to have complimentary high speed Internet and a free New York Times daily. That is my idea of the right and true. But I don't have a laptop except for these old IBM Thinkpad 701Cs that we bought, what, seven years ago? More? So long ago, I don't remember. The batteries long ago quit holding a charge and the last person to use one was my mom learning to use a machine before she got her own. When I was cleaning out, I found the batteries were leaking. Still, I had WIN95 on them and they did still boot. If only I could get a browser recent enough to support my WEB mail to work, it would be great to take one. They weigh nothing sans a battery and they are virtually worthless so if it got stolen, so what?

I drag one out, boot it and find that IE 5.5 is supposed to work. Of course, I have to clear stuff off its miniscule hard drive to get it downloaded. In the meantime, I have tried to log into our WEB email and that isn't working so I've had to post a problem for our ISP and I've finally gotten someone to tell me that we need to use a different place to log in.

The cousins come back (another cousin is assisting the AC man today) and they start running around the attic. I finally decide to leave the little laptop that could cranking on installing IE 5.5 and go to the gym.

I do my 45+ minutes on the bike. No weight machines today. I am still reading Fermat's Enigma. It's amazing how interesting this guy makes mathematician's lives. It's really a story full of intrigue.

By the time I get home, the little laptop has IE 5.5, I've figured out how to do WEB e-mail on it for us and the one other WEB app I might use. Now I have a light, almost throw-away laptop to take to the hotel. Two years ago I stayed in the Hudson, though, and their high speed Internet turned out to not exist at all. I used dial-up access my old employer provided to get on the Internet (and paid the outrageous phone charges myself since I was looking at my business mail but on a pleasure trip). I think I got them to give me a discount on that. So, we will see if the Iroquois really has it and for free. Last year I stayed in the Four Seasons hotel for a couple of nights on a coupon FFP bought at a charity event. They did indeed have high speed access and for free. Which made me happy because the last time I'd stayed there they didn't have it and their phone charges were outrageous, metered even for local calls. Nor was I impressed that my complaint was answered simply with the fact that they would one day install high speed access. I expected to get a coupon or something.

All of which is to say...getting access to the Internet can be easy or hard but I'm happy with my ability to do it on this worthless little machine.