Younger Son drove up yesterday afternoon.
This is how he drove that last 20 miles.
Let's do bullets, shall we?
- My Mac Mini had been slowing down unmercifully over that last few months. Adding an external hard drive for docs, spreadsheets, photos, and music helped a lot,
- In an effort to make it better yet YS and I wiped the internal hard drive and we he reinstalled the OS.
- Did it help? Yes, but I have spent a lot of time over the past month trying to recover stuff that seems to have gone missing -- my calendar, my address book, all my iTunes playlists, a huge chunk of photos in iPhoto.
- Happily, my calendar, address book, and playlists are intact on my iPhone.
- Tragically, my computer is being extremely stubborn about synching with those apps.
- I may need to resort to hand grenades. Or nuclear weapons.
- What are the chances that will work?
- [/whine]
Elder Son:
- Finished his coursework at UMich in Ann Arbor, went back to Big Nasty Med School in Manhattan to finish his last credit there.
- Last credit had been left unfinished to prevent four years of med school loans from coming due while he was in grad school.
- On March 17 he found out he had *matched* for his residency.
- (The Match is a complicated nationwide thing that matches fourth-year med students with residency programs in their selected specialty.)
- His mood, which has ranged from frustrated to sullen to depressed to righteously angry during his med school years, improved dramatically.
- Four days later -- a brief period during which those students who didn't match and those residency programs that didn't fill scramble frantically to interview each other via Skype in hopes of falling in love -- he found out his match was with a hospital in Sioux Falls SD.
- While he would have preferred to be in Duluth, he thinks the program in SF is actually a bit better.
- His mood improved even more.
- He has been bombarding us with links to 1, houses for sale in SF, and b, pictures of Newfoundlands.
- He has wanted a Newfie for years.
- We think buying a house is just so he can be sure he will have a place to have a Newfie.
- Priorities, people, priorities!
Smokey:
- Had a cardiologist appointment last week.
- All good.
- He returned to work a couple days, er, nights ago.
- He has found that the stents in his coronary arteries seem to have improved the circulation to his legs, which used to cramp at night and/or be restless.
- This equals better sleep.
- He has also found that he no longer needs to sit down to put on his pants. His balance is improved so much he can do it standing up.
- I am jealous of that.
- He bought a zombie mask to wear when he went back to work (since he had risen from the dead).
- Black/weird humor is our specialty. Also popular among psych personnel.
Me:
- I am rolling along on my Fairfield cardigan. Back is done to the armholes, sleeves are about 6" long.
- This is a delightful knit -- just enough cabling/lace to make it interesting, but lots of stockinette so it doesn't take forever.
- I just hope I have enough yarn.
- I made the back 2" shorter than the pattern called for, but the pattern length seemed to be for someone taller than I. The shorter length is the same as most of my sweaters.
- I have been working way harder than I necessarily wanted to on my campaign for my fourth term on our county board -- lit drops, knocking on doors, making phone calls, putting up signs.
- It didn't help that I had lost MS Word from my computer (see above) or that my computer was not talking to my printer (ditto) during the time when I was making flyers and drafting my answers to survery questions from a local newspaper.
- Smokey's coal-fired computer running MS Word 97 and his printer (that used to be mine and is at least ten years old) came to the rescue.
- I spent a couple weeks running back and forth between his office and mine, dodging piles of crappe in both places.
- My entire campaign is contained on a thumb drive.
- When Big Money rolls into the county to back a slate of candidates, it makes the rest of the candidates work harder than has ever been done before.
- But I have met a lot of people I didn't necessarily know before, and I have had a lot of help from others who believe in me.
- Tuesday is Election Day.
- Keep your fingers crossed, m'kay? Thanks.
