First, the printer:  Here’s what I had in mind: I was going to delete the printer from the devices available, disconnect the printer from the computer (and the electricity), reboot the computer, reinstall the driver software (which, I believe, requires reconnecting the printer), and see if that would work.

But before I did that I figured let me see what happens now when I try to print something, so I’ll have specific notes– I get this message, I see this dialog box, etc.  So I opened a file and hit print, and it printed.

You got that?

Then I realized that I haven’t been receiving the NY Times digests in my email; I’m not sure why.  I’d originally tried to print the crossword puzzle; I’m going to go to the web site and see what’s up there.  I had only one puzzle, from Monday, and it was painfully easy.  But my father can print his stuff, and that makes me very happy– and let’s me relax a little.

Our Other-Coastal friends showed up with some gorgeous starfruit (one with seven (!) points).  We chatted for a bit.  They apologized for Cobra Woman, and wondered if my parents were still speaking to them.  Eventually we went to lunch, and then they dropped me back at the apartment and went to the beach.

I was exhausted.  I threw the second load of clothes into the washing machine and stretched out on the bed.  I didn’t sleep, but I didn’t move much for an hour or so.  I started reading Evening Class, by Maeve Binchy (the beginning of which I didn’t like, but which I’m now enjoying).

By the time the boys got back from the beach we were all pretty much wiped out, so we said good-bye to them before supper, which my mother made for us.  (It was salmon, and very, very good.)

And then I pretty much collapsed.  We went to sleep and slept until six o’clock, which is abnormally late for us.  I didn’t feel much like walking, but we took a short walk and that has perked me up a little.  I’ll go swimming, but I plan to take it very easy today.

Please keep your fingers crossed that the printer keeps working.  I have no idea what I’d do to make it work again if it stopped.

After our breakfast and swim yesterday we drove to the pier again.  There was less traffic, but there were more cars already at the beach area.  Still, with our shiny new sticker, we had no trouble finding a parking place.

We followed the same routine as before; I walked to the pier and back, and sat and read while my sweetie took a longer walk down the beach.  I was sitting on the bench listening to Follies on my iPhone, when I realized that a couple who had just come up from the beach were talking to me, so I yanked out my earphones so I could hear them.  They’d seen us go onto the beach together, so they recognized my sweetie (“your husband” is what they called him; we’ll accept that) as having been just below the stairway.  (There is a stairway at just about every block, from the parking area down to the beach; some of them are marked with the avenue, but not all, and 14th Avenue South is (alas) not marked.)  So I went to the top of the stairs and stood there until my sweetie spotted me.

We drove home, detouring because one of the gates didn’t work properly, and put ourselves together and had some lunch.  Soon after lunch we had a visit from our cousins, bearing (yum!) frosted brownies. We chatted about a wide assortment of things for a while, and then I realized it was after four.  We had a dinner reservation at six, and I was going to need to rest for a while, so we said good-bye to them.

I took a bubble bath (no lavender; this was gardenia, but pretty mildly scented), and stretched out for a while.  Then we got dressed and went to the club.  It was very busy.  It took quite a while for them to take our order.  I didn’t really see anything on the menu that appealed to me, and I ended up ordering veal marsala, even though I knew the sauce wasn’t really what I wanted.  They brought our first course promptly, but there was a long wait for our entree.  (An hour after we entered the dining room we were still waiting for it.) And then all four of us were disappointed in our dinners.  The manager stopped by to ask how things were, and my mother told him.  He said that we could have asked to have any of the items prepared more simply.  (Now he tells us.)  Okay, so they’ll know for next time. But that was disappointing, and very tiring.

Today our friends from the Other Side of the state are coming back over, and have offered help getting the computer and the printer to talk.  I’ll be glad of that.  I didn’t even try yesterday.  (I have discovered, thought, that the scanner is working just fine– from the computer.  That is, I can click a button on the computer and the scanner scans.)

We’ve had our morning walk, and our breakfast.  I have a load of laundry in the dryer; when it comes out we’ll take our swim.

This morning is a little cooler than yesterday, but very clear.  The moon is waning, and it’s just a crescent now, so it’s pretty dark, and the stars were beautiful when we took our morning walk.

Yesterday’s excursion was to the pier.  We replaced the sticker for the car, so we had no trouble parking.  Whereas, in the past, we’ve gone as far south of the pier as we can find parking, yesterday we went only a couple of blocks south.  We discovered that there were benches in that area, so when we separated, I walked up to the pier and back, and then sat on a shady bench and read (The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls, a gift from friends on New Year’s Eve).  I realized that I had my phone with me, and that even if I can’t use it to make calls, I can use it to play music, so I was well entertained until my sweetie found his way back to me, right on time.  The beach was lovely, and I enjoyed the short walk, but that’s more exercise than I’ve been getting, and I was tired.

After the beach we stopped off to do some grocery shopping.  It was mobbed; I couldn’t find a spot at all close to the store, so eventually I gave up.  We picked up a bunch of things, and then came home.

I tried working my way, step by step, through the diagnostics for getting the printer to work, and have not yet made it happen.  There are still a couple of steps I want to try, but I may have to give up.  When I open the utility I get a message inviting me to download the latest versions of HP software– which I’ve already done at least three times.  I gave up for the evening.

After supper we watched the DVD of Cobra Woman, the 1944 Maria Montez movie, that our friends left with us on Monday.  It was just as bad as I remembered, and the extravagant costumes and bad acting were great fun.  (What I hadn’t previously noticed was that the hero does rather less rescuing than the monkey.)  (The monkey, by the way, wears a loincloth.)

Ah, well.  Today we’ll go back to the pier for a little while, and then have a visit from my cousins.  Printer notwithstanding, it should be fun.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Same routine:  We’ve had our early walk and our breakfast.   Soon we’ll have our swim.

The beach was lovely yesterday.  I allowed myself ten minutes on a bench in the sun (with plenty of SPF 50 sunscreen on any exposed skin), but otherwise made myself comfortable at a well-shaded picnic table, where I read.  (I was reading Freakonomics, which I’d found at the book exchange in our building.  I found it intriguing, but ultimately not very satisfying.)

The only annoying thing is that my iPhone is apparently unable to make calls from this area.  I have no idea why not, and it’s pretty annoying to pay this much for a plan and not be able to make any calls.  (I can receive calls just fine.)  I’ll have to ask Verizon WTF.  Yet another item on my todo list.

We got home to discover that Mom and Dad were planning a library trip, and that they could renew their beach stickers at the library.  They had a bunch of errands to do (including a frustrating and protracted visit to the bank to figure out an inaccuracy in the 1099).  But the returned, eventually, and were glad to have the stickers.  So later this morning we’ll be able to avail ourselves of them and park in the residents’ area at the beach.

I also had a chance to speak to one of my cousins.  I’ll see him tomorrow, but it was fun to chat a little in the meantime.  And I had email from an old friend that I hadn’t heard from in ages and who wants to send me something (but will wait until I’m home again).

I still need to deal with the printer.  One thing that occurs to me is that my father has been postponing the replacement of some cartridges that the printer thinks need replacing.  It’s not impossible that, until they’ve been replaced, the printer won’t respond to updates; I confess that I don’t understand these things very well.  And I’ve had some helpful advice from a friend and colleague about following through, so later today, when we’ve replaced the cartridges, I’ll check that out more fully.

The routine has set in:  Early walk, breakfast, swim.

Yesterday after our swim, we drove to the pier in my mother’s car, which has a resident sticker.  We had just parked and were getting ready to go down to the beach when a beach patrol guy noticed that the sticker was out of date.  I didn’t have the energy to deal with finding an alternative spot in the area, so we gave up, did some shopping, and retreated to the apartment.  My parents were very surprised to learn about the sticker; my father thought they’d updated it.  I, of course, didn’t know whether they were likely to have forgotten, and I wasn’t going to argue with the beach patrol.

I spent a relatively quiet day, but discovered that my father’s printer isn’t happy with the new computer, even though the manufacturer’s web page says the drivers are all part of the software package, so I did a software update.  That was a many-hour download, so I put it off until nobody was going to want to do any internetting for a while.  This morning, alas, the driver still seems to be absent, so I’ll have to poke around a bit more.  (At the very worst, my father will buy a new printer, but that’s a pain when this one has been working well enough.)

I also made a couple of minor adjustments for my mother on her computer.  There’s one thing I have to check: sometimes when she sends mail to me the address gets corrupted.  I haven’t been able to reproduce the problem, so I want to watch her do it and figure out how to make it stop.

One thing about being here:  My father is a doctor, and he has no false optimism about the future.  It’s not easy, especially when I’m feeling as good as I am now, to give up the pretense that it can just go on forever, but it’s real.  Meantime, I just take a day at a time, and enjoy it as much as I can.  Today I think we’ll go to a beach that’s part of a state park.  No sticker required, and shaded picnic tables where I can sit and read while my sweetie walks on the beach.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Yesterday was wonderful. After our early walk, we had breakfast and then took a swim.  I had no idea how much stamina I’d have.  On past vacations I’ve started off doing five laps or so of crawl and brought it up to fifty by the time we leave, but I have no desire to push that hard now.  I thought I’d aim for five laps and quit, and I almost did.  After the fifth lap I really didn’t want to stop, so I did a lap of sidestroke.  (Sidestroke doesn’t really count because it’s so easy to do, right?)

There’s also a small spa, and we were late enough that my parents were doing their swim while we were still in the spa, so we had a family party, just the four of us, for a while. Then we came back to the apartment, and I showered and dressed, and figured I’d see if I could set up my father’s computer.

Forgive me if I’ve told this part before:  My father has been using a Mac laptop– a Wall Street– that I got for him in 2001.  I know exactly how old it is because I’d planned to fly down to configure it for him the weekend of September 15, but (ahem) world events made me decide to cancel the trip.  Anyhow, even with the memory maxed out (and no danger of running out of disk space), the old machine is slow and limited.  But my father no longer has patience for learning new software, and Lion doesn’t support the applications he needs, so I got him a refurb from Apple– an iMac that shipped with Snow Leopard, and I promised him I’d transfer his data over when I got down there.

And now I was “down there”.  Besides, one of the friends who’d be visiting is knowledgeable about such things, and I thought it would be a good idea to start things going, so if I ran into trouble he’d be around to help bail me out.  And now the good news: Except for some unpleasantness about the system password (and keychain password), readily solvable with reference to documentation that turned up when I asked for it, it all went swimmingly, and by the time our friends arrived I had moved the iMac into position on the desk and was attaching cables to it.  (My knowledgeable friend did help to figure out that one cable, that seemed to disappear into nothing, had doubled back on itself and was, in fact, connected.)

And then we were free to play.  We chatted for a while.  Our friends brought star fruit from their garden.  (It’s a lot better than any I’ve ever bought.)  Eventually we went out to lunch. My father had a medical appointment, and my mother was going with him, so they were out when we finished.  I let the boys drop me off at the apartment where I rested while they spent the afternoon at the beach.

They came back, full of beach air and pictures of birds and butterflies and light on the water, and we talked for a while.  We were about to go out for dinner when Mom overruled us, saying she’d made dinner for us all, so we dined together and talked for a while, and then it was time for our guests to make their way over to the other side of the peninsula– and for us to go to sleep.

Which, believe me, we did.

But we woke up bright and early this morning to what looks like another beautiful day. We had our walk, and my sweetie is making breakfast.  Happy Thanksgiving!

The worst part of the trip yesterday, by far, was security.  Normally, my sweetie and I take an early flight.  This means leaving for the airport at 5am or so, but we don’t generally have a problem with that.  But when I booked this flight I didn’t know how I’d feel that early in the day, so I picked a midday flight instead.  That meant that the airport was much busier.  We had a bit of a wait to check our bags, and a much longer wait in the security line.

There were lots more wheelchairs and strollers than we’re used to seeing on the early flights, and the staff seemed less well organized.  The line we were in ran out of bins, and for a long time nobody replaced them.  When they did come to replace them, positioning the bin trolley meant moving the entire waiting line.  (This particularly affected us because, by then, we had just reached the edge of the first table.)  I was feeling very tired.  My carry-on bag was quite heavy, and I really wanted to sit down.  It was about half an hour to get through; once we were actually able to get our stuff into bins and our bins onto the tables (which weren’t even, so things couldn’t just slide along), it all went fast enough.  And there actually were benches where we could put ourselves back together.

So we were at the gate by about 10:00, to discover that our flight was marked “delayed” by about an hour.  I wasn’t confident my parents would check on the flight status, so I called them.  They didn’t answer (I figured they were swimming), so I left a message on their machine. At this point, I realized that part of my problem was food.  I normally have a Boost at about 9:30, and I needed something.  My sweetie discovered that there was a Ben & Jerry’s in the gate area that did smoothies.  They came in two sizes: 14 oz. and 20 oz.  My Boost is 8 oz; I asked for a small one.  The clerk asked if I was sure I wanted a small– “The large is only fifty cents more”– and I assured her that a small was fine.  I shared it with my sweetie, and I felt much better afterwards.  And then I called my parents again, got my mother (who had not seen my message), and felt much better.

Finally the plane showed up; turns out the plane we were supposed to have taken had had a mechanical problem, so they’d had to switch aircraft.  The flight itself was fine.  My television kept going dark on me, and I could probably have hit JetBlue up for a $15 voucher if I’d insisted on showing it to one of the crew, but it worked more than adequately for my purposes.

We landed; my bag came down in the middle of the run; sweetie’s was the last bag off our flight.  We collected it and went outside to call my parents who’d be waiting in the cell-phone area.  And my lovely new iPhone wouldn’t make the call.  Fortunately, my sweetie’s El Cheapo worked fine.  (I couldn’t hear, in the ambient noise at the airport, what the problem was, but I tried again once we were in the car, with Mom and her phone beside me, and I got “area not accessible” or some such thing.  I think it’s unforgivable, but there your are.)  And then I realized with some dismay that it’s been so long since I actually entered the password for this blog that I had no idea what it was.

Anyhow, we arrived safely, with a quick stop at the grocery store to pick up a rotisserie chicken for dinner, got ourselves unpacked and stowed away. By then it was nearly five o’clock.  We relaxed a little.  I let other people take care of me more than usual, but I definitely enjoyed dinner, and managed to stay awake well past eight o’clock (by which time my sweetie had fallen asleep, clothes and glasses still on).

We woke up bright and early this morning, and took a 45-minute walk before the golf course opened.  And on the way I realized that WordPress probably has a “forgot your password?” option, which it has, so I used it and here I am.

Today we’ll have a visit from the friends from the East Coast who visited us in New York last month.  All four of us are looking forward to that.

The temperature is 15 degrees F according to the weather channel.  We have layers, and we won’t be outdoors very long.  It’s been cool at the other end too, but not like this, and for that, as for so much else, we are thankful.

In half an hour, we’re off, and very happy about it.

I’m certainly glad we packed on Thursday, because today was somewhat rough.  I haven’t felt like eating much.  I skipped the oatmeal at lunch in favor of egg, which is easier for me to eat, and just had one of those nutritional drinks for supper.  My stomach feels a little unsettled, and I figure it’s better to play it safe.

I’d planned on making some phone calls this afternoon, but I ended up sleeping a fair amount and when I woke up I’d forgotten about the calls, so I never made them.  I’m a little nervous about the trip, I think.  I need to make a sandwich for my lunch tomorrow.  (I wish I could just take an energy drink with me, but it’s 8 ounces of liquid, so that’s out.)

The only things left to pack are the electronics, and I’ll have time in the morning to get them together.  So now I’m going to make my sandwich and make sure there’s nothing else to check off my list, and then I’m going to relax.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Anyone for triskaidekaphobia?  Today has been pretty good.  I got up early, dealt with a recurrent computer issue (that won’t be resolved, I’m afraid, until I replace the machine, but so far it hasn’t been too terribly annoying), did some work, had breakfast, changed the bed linens (standard Friday chore), showered, went back to work, and then got ready for my infusion.

The weather today was a bit wet in the morning, but pretty warm, with temperatures threatening to drop and wind speeds to rise during the day.  The ride to the hospital was easy enough, and our progress was good.  Dr. S was teaching today.  His NP examined me.  She was glad to hear that I was feeling better, and wasn’t able to feel anything abnormal when she palpated me.  She said Dr. S had been very disappointed to realize what time I was coming in because he’d got a new tie and was wearing it for my benefit.  I, meanwhile, had worn a pendant of which I’m particularly fond, to show him.  But he hadn’t finished yet by the time we were ready to leave, so we didn’t see him.  We did run into our friend (the one we’ve run into there before), and spoke to him briefly, on our way out.

The subway was crowded for our trip back.  I managed to squeeze into an empty seat between two youngsters who were clearly not thrilled about it.  I thanked them for their (grudging) shift, and made sure my hospital ID tag was visible.  I really didn’t want to stand for the ride.  Later on, seats opened across the way and my sweetie and I sat together in comfort.  I’m sure the kids were happy, too.

We got home without anything more exciting happening.  My sweetie made my my oatmeal.  I’m not happy having oatmeal for lunch, but I can’t eat it for breakfast and it’s too filling for a snack.  Lunch is a meal that I’ve been enjoying because I can get variety in my proteins without having a meal that feels like dinner.  (I could do this in the evening, but it’s more convenient and more congenial to share a meal with my sweetie.)

After that, I checked in briefly online and then stretched out on the bed.  I didn’t actually nap, but I did rest.  My sweetie brought up a gift from a far-away friend– a tee shirt that includes my (invisible) totem, along with peace and love icons.  I love it, and I’m overwhelmed that people keep sending and bringing me presents.

I called a couple of people– my comp sci mentor, because I promised I’d keep in touch and I wanted him to know I meant it, and my boss.  Mostly, I just maintained that I was fading fast and couldn’t focus.  I’ll try again tomorrow afternoon if I’m feeling up to it.

And then I just collapsed until my sweetie went into the kitchen to make us a light supper and I came her to do this entry.  Happy Thanksgiving, and Happy Friday the 13th.