Busy, Busy

This has been a really busy stay here in Colorado.  First was the getting ready for the family gathering at my sister's house.  It was fun to see a bunch of the relatives.  Then clean up afterwards.  In the meantime, my brother-in -law found a nice pond to swim my dog and their standard poodle.  We learned that their dog can't swim.  He loves water but is pathetic swimming.  He doesn't use his hind legs and splashes the water with his front legs.  Then when he can reach the ground standing up, he walks out on his hind legs.


I emailed the refrigerator guy and got a response the next day with a detailed pdf on how to test the thing.  It appeared the thermostat is not working.  A couple more emails and he wanted me to call him.  I got hold of him Thursday.  He asked that I mail him the ASU unit so they could test it and would replace it if defective under warranty.  Then he told me how to wire in a switch so I could manually turn the compressor on and off.  That has been working pretty well.  The 100+ days has meant the compressor has to stay on almost all the time so there was little I had to remember.  He said on Tuesday that the ASU tested fine so he thinks the fault is with the switch unit so he's sending me a new one of those and it should be here Thursday or Friday.  So far, Isotherm has been sterling to deal with the problem.

On Monday, I drove down to Denver to see my mother.  There was a small dinner with my brother's clan that was fun.  His daughter recently came out as gay and has "married" her partner.  I discovered this by clues left on facebook.  My niece is a lovely person and I had suspected for years that she is gay.  So I asked them if congratulations were in order and told her partner that I had one thing to say to her: welcome to the family.  My niece told me her parents are giving her grief over it and told her that whatever she does, don't let her grandmother know.  I told her that her grandmother already had figured it out and is fine with it.  I just wanted to let her know that at least some of her extended family is still supportive of her, because really, so what.  She is still the same lovely, caring person she always was. My mother was so happy I had let her know that she knows.

I've spent Tuesday and Wednesday getting my 93.6 year old mother up and running with a new laptop and wireless router. It really shouldn't have taken me so long. I'm feeling rather rusty in my geek skills. The DSL she's got is horrible - .2Mbps so downloading took forever and you couldn't go anywhere on the internet while something was downloading. The router's auto install screwed itself up so that took me a long time to figure out. Once I reset it and did it in the order you are always supposed to do, it configured itself right. Then it took forever to get the homegroup to set up right. Then finally magically, it found itself and worked. Well, after I changed a setting on the router. Had to write up a document of all the settings too. But now, I can get on her wireless network in my van.

Now she has the laptop with her email, a new facebook account so she can see all the pictures of the grand and great grandkids, and a lap desk so she can be comfortable to use it.