Happy New Year

Dear Mom,

Fairly ordinary day, Don went to town to run some errands and I cleaned the house and did laundry.

Mom was absolutely horrid, she's been running her mouth, pulling out her nose hose and peeling off her bandages for days. She's been really hyped and this morning was very lucid and proceeded to tell the Hospice nurse how mean I am. I agreed wholeheartedly so she had no more ammo. The nurse explained to me "people with this condition really don't know what they're doing". I said, "Uh-huh, that's why she always waits until you've been out of the room for at least 5 minutes, takes out the hose and pulls her bandages off." It's OK, she made me pay later. No, a person would not sit in a dirty diaper just so the caretaker (me) would have to clean it up, tell me it's not true. This was while I was trying to get the floors mopped so I could finish dinner. She needed an emergency shower and the potty chair, the bath chair and other parts of the bathroom needed a Clorox treatment. I enlisted Don's help to cut turnips and carrots for the pot roast while I finished mopping and he looked put out because he needed to finish the ezine. That "attitude" changed right smart. To mess with me this evening would be a bad idea.

OK, rant over, for now.

We're trying to get the sound working in PCLinuxOS, but it's not cooperating and we don't know why. That's the OS on the computer we're giving you, and the one I'm working on now. Not only do I want you to have sound, of course, but I want to be able to talk to you with VOIP, which would be so cool. Imagine having a "telephone" tutor while you're first trying to understand how to use a computer! I'll be working on the text-tutorial I'm putting on the desktop to show you the very first steps in using a computer. It's odd, for about a week I've been using the Linux box almost exclusively and it's very disorienting when I switch back to Windows to do something in particular or go find a picture or document that's in my Windows machine .

We're just about finished with the ezine and we'll post tonight right after midnight. Then it will be the New Year. I have a good feeling about the coming year, the last few have been so wonderful it's a bit hard to describe.

I'll "start as I mean to go on" and get to bed and to sleep quickly, mainly because I have to work fairly early tomorrow. My Tuesday lady, Dixie, may have to go into the hospital to see what's been wrong with her lungs for the past few months, so she wants me to help her put away her Christmas decorations. Scary stuff.

The pot roast was wonderful, I'm stuffed and happy and the ezine is finished. What more could a person want?

Happy New Year to you and Beth and Daniel, this promises to be the best one yet!

I love you,

Lisa