Laptops and wheelchairs.

We had dinner last night at my parents house and my mother (who is an excellent cook) made an especially delicious meal of homemade dumplings and the very tender beef/tendon dish that I love. My dad, for a few years, had trundled along with a $300 laptop. I remember the last time his laptop broke – it must have been during the pandemic and I tried to get him to wait a few days for Jeremy to pick out a reasonable one for him. We have a saying in our house which is – let’s buy the Honda Accord version – mainly we want something solidly built, mass produced, easily and reasonably fixable, but absolutely nothing extra – no style, no flash, nothing luxurious, but not so cheap that it falls apart in 3 weeks, it needs to be dependable. So I was like – we need to buy the Honda Accord of laptops. But my dad couldn’t wait and went promptly out – probably to Best Buy or Walmart and bought the cheapest one he could find – $300, definitely the yugo of laptops. But my father is the captain of his own ship, so I shrugged and went on with my life until Monday night when he called and said that his computer broke and he needed to pull files from it. So he brought it over to the house and Jeremy tried to get it to restart to no avail and of course, it’s not fixable really nor are the power cables standard to any modern laptop system. But Jeremy said he’d try over the next few days, ordered another weird power cable in case that was the culprit. Then my dad left and a few hours later, the computer decided randomly to power up. So Jeremy dutifully downloaded the files my dad wanted, but then we also realized that the screen was so bad that it was basically unreadable and that the speed of the processing was so slow that one literally had to wait 2 minutes between opening/closing programs or files. And so now, really, this is intolerable for something I know he spends hours a day entertaining himself with. So we did buy the honda accord of laptops for him – a dell something or other (very boring. no colors. no gaming. no steve jobs.) which matches Vince’s school computer and Jeremy’s work computer so something we are all familiar with for fixing and Jeremy has the tools for replacing batteries, etc. And we showed up to dinner with this modern contraption. To which my father was both excited for and frustrated with. what?!! no disk drive? only 3 USB ports? What about Microsoft word/excel? So there was a slight talking down from the ledge about these things. We introduced him to the free Google docs/sheets suite which we all use personally. (again, this is true love, Jeremy setting up my dad’s computer, swoon).

Note Edda rocking her TS Era’s shirt gifted from a friend who went to see her live. We did not go (I saw her in a movie theater for $15 which was fine enough for this swifty). I’m a little worried that TS has jumped the shark with the super bowl. I heard little whispers of overexposure from various sources. I hope her next album is good.

This morning, look at the glory of Edda’s bacon and egg pajamas! Disregard her grump face. We bought a new travel wheelchair for her. We wanted something lighter and smaller when we travel because….we are old and tired. Her school wheelchair is very heavy (probably close to 50 pounds) and is made to tie down in a school bus and survive crashes, but this one is probably closer to 25 pounds and is to zip zip around. We’ll see how it goes, she won’t be able to nap as comfortably, because there isn’t a head rest, but perhaps it’ll be OK.