March 21, 2001
Dear Everyone:
Last week’s trip to Monterey was a huge success. We had perfect weather for wandering around in Monterey, Pacific Grove (world headquarters for Monarch butterflies), Carmel-By-The-Sea and Carmel Valley (not the same place entirely). The only drawback was that too much walking made Mother’s back hurt. So instead of walking too much, we would sit on benches (or lean on short walls) and watch Italians playing bocci ball.
Bocci ball, as defined by my online dictionary is “an Italian game similar to lawn bowling”. This information would be more helpful if we knew what lawn bowling is. Also according to my online dictionary, “a game played on a smooth lawn with wooden balls, which are rolled to stop as near as possible to a target ball (the jack)”. However, bocci ball is played on a court of sand or crushed oyster shells (according to “Jeannie” who has actually played the game on occasion).
And how did we know they were Italian? Ever notice how many Italian restaurants there are on the greater Monterey peninsula? (Besides, they were speaking Italian and one of them was named “Rosario”. Who but an Italian would put up with being named “Rosario”?) At any rate, while Monterey was originally established by the Spaniard colonists, they evidently didn’t know much about fishing. Italy, on the other hand, is surrounded on three sides by water and, thus, Italians make great fishermen. Monterey was originally a fishing village, so they needed fishermen. Thus ends the history lesson for this week.
We got home from Monterey somewhat late on Tuesday, so decided to spend Wednesday getting Mother acquainted with her new computer. When Mother moved into her new apartment at the retirement community, Mary’s Woods, she realized that there just wasn’t room for the “old” PC and cart. The old stuff was relegated to a storage room, for now, and we decided Mother should replace it with a laptop computer which would take up far less room and be newer and faster besides.
It became my job to locate such a computer. If I picked it out, I would know what she had and could thus better fulfil my obligations as the Family Help Desk. We decided that this advantage would offset the cost of local Sales Tax. And this was even before we found out that a comparable machine purchased in Oregon would have cost hundreds of dollars more (one advantage to living in the Bay Area: More competition for your purchasing dollars).
I found a terrific Sony Vaio, their latest and greatest, so popular that they literally couldn’t keep them on the shelves. I could purchase it at lunchtime and pick it up after work when the truck arrived to deliver a new shipment. One reason I chose the Sony over the next computer at a comparable price was that it came loaded with Microsoft Word. This means that when Mother needs help with a Word document, if I can’t talk her through it over the phone, she can email it to me and I can work on it on my PC.
As for email, Mother is now on my America Online account. This costs her nothing since I can have up to seven screen names on one account and so far, “Jeannie” and I have only used two. So Mother gets all the advantages of AOL without spending anything. The only disadvantage is that only one of us can be logged onto the system at any one time.
In fact, “Jeannie” called me last weekend to say she tried to log on and couldn’t because Mother was logged on at the time. She found this confusing since Mother flew back up to Portland on Thursday and I hadn’t shipped the computer (plus another box of mouse, mouse-pad, raincoat and various other things) yet. I explained to “Jeannie” that it was I, logged onto Mother’s ID in order to customize her TV Guide Online.
FYI… Mother’s screen name and email address is now, officially, USMCWR1@aol.com. (That’s United States Marine Corps, Women’s Reserve, with a 1 added because somebody else had already claimed “usmcwr” and the system requires unique screen names. She should have the new PC hooked up and ready for action by the end of this week, so feel free to email a message to her.
In other news…
“Jeannie” and I finally took her old, cat-demolished sofa and chair, plus anything else she could think of, to the Martinez dump. We borrowed a very old pickup truck from one of her court reporter friends and filled it to capacity and then some. Luckily it only took one trip. Luckily because the truck’s engine died on us three times, every time I tried to put it in reverse. Seems it has kind of a weak battery.
Each time it died, we would wait until the battery had had a chance to rest, then try again. When we finally reached the dump ($26.00 to dump “2 sofas”), I was concerned because protocol required that we back up to the really big pile of stuff that other people had thrown away. The kindly gentleman in charge at the dump site allowed us to go straight in. That took care of clearing out the truck’s contents, but it meant we would have to back up in order to get away from the really big pile of stuff.
I crossed my fingers and put the pickup in reverse. Maybe it was just too embarrassing for it to die in front of all those other pickups and rentals. At any rate, for once, the engine did not die and we were able to get back to “Jeannie’s” friend’s place without further incident. We put the cinder block and brick that we had brought along to help hold down the cover (loads without a tarp get a hefty extra-charge for some reason) in the trunk of my car, where they remain to this day, since we completely forgot them afterward.
“Jeannie’s” coming to my place on Sunday to help watch the Academy Awards on TV and spend the night. Maybe I can sneak the bricks into her stuff before she leaves on Monday.
Love, as always,
Pete
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