This weekend was certainly a humdinger.
Thursday night, Rachel and I went by to visit Dad and found him in the 3rd floor activity room taking part in the birthday celebration of his immediate neighbor. We, of course, didn't want to intrude, but we were invited to join the party so strongly that we couldn't resist. We wished Mrs. B happy birthday, accepted our cake and ice cream, and sat down with dad. The birthday girl opened her presents, which included a couple from the nurses.
This surprised me the most, perhaps. I know that the policy of the Jewish Home is that residents and their families are not allowed to give the nurses gifts or money, so the idea that they would spend their own money on a gift for a resident shows the quality of care that the staff gives the residents.
Friday afternoon, I went over to Rachel's school a little before five. I had had the car (not that I did any thing with it) and had to pick her up. I got there before she was ready (on purpose) and she let me into the library to take a look at their network. They have 15 PowerMacs connected to an ethernet network. All of this is supposed to be hooked to the internet through a Netopia router with dual 56K analog modems.
The problem, of course, is that the numbnut who set it up didn't do it write and it has never worked. Now, of course, he off galavanting around the south seas on a yacht, living off of the school district's money. Nice work if you can sleep at night afterwards.
Well, after redoing the IP addresses and DNS addresses a few times, I got it working for them. Pam, the tech person for the school came down to check it out and give me a hand; she was thrilled to see it working.
At one point we tried calling Mindspring to get the correct DNS numbers -- they're not listed on the web site and we waited an hour for a response from their online tech support. The representative wasted about 10 minutes asking for our customer information. Finally, I just told the guy "look on the wall in front of you. Somewhere there will be the letters D-N-S -- David, Nancy, Simon -- followed by some numbers. Find the letters and tell me what the numbers are. Don't worry about what they mean, just read them to me."
Luckily, someone had indeed written down the DNS addresses for this guy and he was able to read them back to me.
After getting the internet access working, I moved on to the network printer they had. It was an HP inkjet printer with a print server stuck on the back. That one was pretty simple; I pushed the cable in tight and printed a test page to get the IP Address. The black ink had gone dry, but I was able to read it enough to tell it was conflicting with one of the Macs.
So I changed -- temporarily -- the IP address on the mac, telnetted to the printer, changed its address, and reset the Mac. That let the Macs see the printer so they could all share it.
The thing about networking is that it seems really confusing and difficult, and if you were to take a class in it, I'm sure it would be, but if you just do it, it's really not very hard at all.
By this time, Rachel was pretty much ready to go, so we packed up her stuff and headed home so she could change her clothes. Afterwards, we picked up Cassie and went over to the Jewish Home to visit Dad and play a couple of games of Mr. Mouth.
Mr. Mouth was one of Cassie's birthday presents, and for those unfamiliar with it, consists of four spring-loaded hands arranged around a central, rotating, opening-and-closing, frog's head. The idea is to be the first to flip your 10 flies into the the frog's mouth as it turns around.
This is a great game for kids around the age of first grade, but it's also good for older folks. it doesn't take too much coordination, and it can be fun. As we were setting up, the frog happened to be facing Dad with its mouth open, and Dad got all of his flies in in short order. Once we started the game, however, he didn't do quite so well.
The rotating and opening-and-closing distracted him somewhat, and he would not be able to react in time, missing his opportunity several times in a row. Still, he didn't do too badly, and enjoyed it. We played a couple of games and decided to call it a night.
We decided to get Chinese Food for dinner, so we called up John and Craig to see if they wanted some as well. We picked up a bunch of food and headed over to GrilleyVille. We got there in time to watch Stargate, and had an enjoyable time all around.
Saturday morning, we got up early to get an oil change and find a storage locker. We dropped the car off and went into the waiting room to call some storage places. Perusing the yellow pages, we happened across an ad for Door-to-Door storage. They had a pretty spiffy idea -- they bring some storage containers to you, you fill them up, and they take them away to store them.
We figured it would be pretty expensive, but it turned out they weren't too bad. There was a $59 fee each time they brought the containers out to you, and it was $69 per month, per container to store stuff. Now, when you compare that to the cost of renting a U- Haul truck, and the inefficiency of loading the stuff into the truck and unloading it again before loading it into a storage locker, it looks pretty darn good.
So we signed up to have them delivered that afternoon. We then called Craig to enlist his help in filling them that afternoon. Since we still had much of the morning before the containers arrived, we stopped for coffee and went to Price Club for conticos -- the plastic boxes we use for storing stuff.
While we were there, we also picked up a hand truck -- which we nearly had to leave behind. We finally got it into the car by opening the sun roof, but then Rachel had to fold herself up to almost nothing to fit in with it. We did make it home however, and the hand truck was a big help.
We got about half of one storage locker filled that afternoon, thanks in large part to Craig's help.
That evening, Rachel and I (well, mostly I) wanted to go to Freight and Salvage in Berkeley to hear Caren Armstrong so we hopped in the shower and got changed. By the time we were ready to go, it was closer to 7 than 6, and the concert started at 8. We still had to hit the ATM and get our butts across the bay, so I had to decide whether to be late to the concert or not visit Dad.
I ended up calling the nurses to have them tell Dad we wouldn't be by, but then I remembered there was an ATM near the Jewish Home, so we didn't have to go to Stonestown or West Portal. We could head right out Ocean, hit the ATM, visit Dad, and zip out Alemany to get on the freeway. So we did.
We walked into Dad's room and he was surprised to see us. He said the nurse had just told him we weren't coming. We explained that we didn't think we had time, but then decided to stop by anyway to at least bring him his paper. He, of course, was looking forward to the next day when he was going to come by for a visit.
It was a short visit, but I was glad to see him, even for just a moment.
We left the Jewish Home and flew out Alemany to get on the freeway just before the 101/280 interchange. When we got downtown, we ran into some traffic, and it was stop and go all the way on to the bridge. Actually, it was stop and hope some bozo doesn't come flying up on the wrong side of the street and cut in in front of you at the last minute. But we made it. About 1/3 of the way across, we passed an accident, and everything cleared up.
In retrospect, it's probably a good thing that we stopped by Dad's -- if we hadn't, we would have been on the bridge right about the time the accident occurred. We zipped across the rest of the way and into Berkeley. We found parking not too far from Freight and Salvage, and headed inside just before eight.
Now, if you haven't discovered Caren Armstrong yet, you're really missing out. This show was in honor of her latest album, Independent Girl. She did two sets -- the first consisting of most of her new album and the second her older material.
I must admit that I think I like her earlier album Every New Day a little better than Independent Girl, but the new one was certainly worth buying. We also bought her first album, My Own Voice which was only available on cassette.
My favorite song of hers is probably The Wheel of Life, which she did not perform (alas), and which could have been written about me and my dad. (Of course, the song Stay Away From Me, especially the line about "I wish you were a snake so I could skin you and roast you on the fire" (or something like that) expresses my feelings for my brother the MegaPutz quite well.) The other song of hers that I really like is Cowboy's Lullaby, but of course they're all good.
The surprising thing about it all is that Rachel really enjoyed herself. Rachel is not really a night-out-on-the-town kind of person. But she does like Caren's music, and enjoyed the concert. So, it wasn't too hard to talk her into planning on the Utah Phillips concert December 11.
On the way home, we experienced one of those things that you know simply isn't worth thinking about, but you can't help pondering nonetheless. We reached the toll plaza of the Bay Bridge only to be waved on through by the toll taker. Apparently, the car ahead of us had paid our way across.
Now, I used to do this occasionally back when the toll was 50 cents, and the driver behind me was especially cute, but these days it's two dollars -- a serious bit of change -- and I am certainly not cute. That left the possibility of someone who knew one of us, but neither of us recognized the car. We sped up a bit to check out the driver.
He was chatting on the phone, and nodded, smiling, as we pulled up next to him. Neither I nor Rachel recognized him, but that could have been due to the difficult viewing conditions as much as anything else. Still, we could identify neither the car nor the driver, so it seemed most puzzling.
I suggested that perhaps he was playing a cruel trick on us -- making us forever wonder who had paid our way -- but sometimes I wonder if I am not simply too cynical. (On the other hand, I might be not cynical enough and come to the same conclusion.)
Whatever his reasons, I offer my thanks to him. Of course, I wouldn't mind it if he let me know why...
Sunday morning, Rachel and I got up fairly early and began loading more boxes and conticos into the storage containers. At about 10:30, I headed out to pick up Dad.
Earlier in the week, dad had asked my what I was doing on Sunday, and when I responded that I didn't know, he asked if he could come over to see what had been done. How could I say no?
So there I was, with Rachel's car, picking him up. Rachel had suggested that he and I could go through all the books on the bookshelves to see what he wanted to keep and what could be gotten rid of, and that seemed like a good idea.
We came in the back, of course, so I could show him the new electrical panel and the garage. We then went around the side to the front and up the front stairs. Although there are noticeably more of them, it was still easier than trying to go up the kitchen stairs would have been -- the front stairs don't have the washing machine blocking the bottom of them.
Inside I showed him the living room and then we got started on the books. There were a lot of books. We got through most of them before he got tired. We watched the football game and ate sandwiches that Rachel picked up for us. All in all, a good time.
Unfortunately, there was still a lot of furniture that had to be loaded into the storage lockers, so on the way back from the Jewish home, I made a desparate call to Johnny for help. He agreed to come over and help.
He arrived a little later with both Gemma and Cassie in tow, followed not too long afterwards by Diane, who promised to clean the dining room chandelier for us, and even offered to use her own cleaning supplies. How could we complain about that?
After we got everything loaded, we ordered some pizzas and watched the unending football shows that were on. I'm not into football in the least, but it was the least we could do in return for Johnny's help.
For some reason, Rachel made me take a shower before going to bed.