January 18

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 We had just parked and were getting ready to go down to the beach when a beach patrol guy noticed that the sticker was out of date.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.