What I do, sometimes frustrating, but what I love to do

 I want in my life to give power to those who are poor and don’t have power, to champion those abused and work to change the society that oppresses and abuses minorities.  So this was my day.   What a day it is has been.

I slept well last night, something uncommon for me, and felt well and rested when I got up.   I did the morning tasks of feeding all the cats, inside, outside, and the one that stays in when it is cold and out when warm.  It was cold last night, so Tupac slept the night in our bed, alternating snuggling me and Ron.  All cats fed morning breakfast I started my morning work on the computer, quickly checking the things, glancing over news feeds before settling in to read, post, or respond.  

At 7:40 I started gathering up trash.  The park recently sent a notice around that instead of having your trash out at 10 am as it always has been, they demand it be out now by 8 am.  Or you have to find a way to dispose of it yourself.  The park has been really reorienting the last few years to a much younger desperate working families and taking a much harder dictatorial line with the rules, ignoring some long standing ones and implementing new onces all designed to gain more market share of younger families needing housing.  So they insist the trash be in white plastic trash bags and be out before most of the older people here are up.  And no, you cannot put it out the night before, we have far too many nighttime critter bandits that would tear into the bags and spread the trash everywhere, which the park now refuses to clean up as they claim it is the homeowner’s responsibility to do so.  

In the process, I wake Ron getting the trash cans in our bedroom and our bedroom bathroom.  He said he would get up, which while I said he did not have to, I was glad he did.  My shoulders have gotten real bad as the MRI showed with torn muscles and decayed shoulder joint bones, so pulling heavy bags out of a trash cans is not only a real effort but it hurts a lot to do.  He knows this so he got up, lately he has not been sleeping a lot during the night and sleeps late into the morning until around 9 am.  

Normally when Ron sleeps that late I eat breakfast earlier myself as I am hunger after getting up normally between 3:30 to 4 am, but I am trying to make myself stay in bed until 5 am.  But since he got up, I offered to make breakfast of fried over easy medium eggs.   For us that means eggs where the whites are fully cooked yet the yoke is still runny and yellow.   Ron loves when I cook the eggs that way, he can’t seem to do it.  But to tell the truth eggs in a hot pan can change so quickly you have to pay attention with no diversions and be able to watch the eggs themselves, because as I said they can go in 10 seconds from great to over cooked with hard yokes. 

At that point, Ron and I made a grocery list.    He gets his Social Security money on the third Wednesday of each month.  We have had a few hard months and needed supplies.   I have been trying to go with him, but Ron decided I had already overdone and needed to stop a bit.   I had started a couple laundry loads, and he wanted me to rest.   So he went out.   While he was out, I got the call.   

The call came from a lady we know here in the park, I have done a lot of work for her computer wise over 20 years.  She is now into her 80s, and lives on a very restricted income.   When her husband died some years back, I helped her with all the needed computer stuff to insure she got her benefits and other things.   Her husband was a retired Marine, and he had dementia / Alzheimer.  She was in grief and over her head, Ron and me along with other in the park stood by and with her getting her through this.  She is also the highly religious catholic lady that a long time ago I was in her home helping her with a computer problem when she was telling me about her god and how she knew he was real.   I finally had enough and looked at her and angry said “You know he is real, then where was he when I was a kid getting repeatedly raped, watching and enjoying it”?  She did not say anything for a few minutes as I turned back to her computer.  Then she said, “I am sorry I upset you, I just … I just know he is real because I feel him”.  We did not talk about her god after that, but we did stay on good terms, maybe friends with her always promising me to help anytime I needed it as then I did not drive and offering to take me anywhere I wanted to go.   I felt bad after for exploding that way, but I had been having nightmares and flashbacks, so was very raw.  I was in the wrong, but I wish she had been able to see I did not believe or feel like she did about her god.   She went to church services 3 or 4 times a week, volunteered at the church and their thrift store.   She really is a simple woman, who deeply clings to her faith.  She doesn’t have much, and her belief is important to her.   Since that day she doesn’t push her god, but I have helped her out by giving her an older printer I was replacing so she could print the church bulletins, I quietly gave her some ink for it that “I found in a closet” when I found out she couldn’t do the bulletins because she was out of ink.  I keep helping her at no cost and she calls me a saint and offers to help me any time.  She will leave small bags of cat food once in a while at our door, knowing we are taking care of the outside cats.   I know on her limited income that is a large cost for her.   I wonder if she understands we see her on the camera’s doing it.  

So where is this getting to be very long almost a novella length post going?  Ron had left to get the groceries and I had settled down at the computer when the call came in.  She was in a panic asking if she could bring her laptop to my home.  She had a chance to do a pilgrimage hosted by her church to a famous Catholic Church in France, she had saved enough money but to be able to do it she had to find a second person to go with her.  That saved her over a thousand dollars and it was limited to a small number of people and she had to get her and her other person entered right away.  This was so important to her, she had wanted to go to the Holy Land but now was worried they would kill her.   I calmed her down.  

I questioned what the problem was.   Seems for months she has not been able to get online with her laptop but could with her phone.  For the history as she is very limited in funds, I struggled for years to keep her internet at the lowest cost possible.  So after the hurricane Ian I had to argue with Comcast for her and get her back online.  She accepted a limited metered data level for a lower price.  I did not know she had a problem since then.  But now she was telling me she had not been able to be online on her laptop for many months, that when she tried to go to a website Comcast webpage came up and she was too confused to figure out what to do.  But as her phone worked and she got her email, she did not call me.  Side note, we talked about that and she will call me in the future.  

So as her bringing her computer to my house wouldn’t let me fix the problem she was having signing on to the internet at home, I told her I would come to her home.  When I got there, she was beside herself about not being able to go on this pilgrimage, something I really don’t understand myself, but I told the inner Scottie that I would do what it took to make it happen on the computer side.  Oh wow.

Well the first problem was her computer had somehow been shifted from her own router to the Xfinity hotspot system.  For those that don’t know if you have Xfinity / Comcast and use their equipment they have a side channel off the router that anyone with a Comcast account can use.  You simply put in your username and password when using the hotspot.   I refuse to allow anyone to piggyback on my internet connection, so I don’t use Comcast’s equipment.  I got her back on her own internet rather quickly.  

But then we ran into the worst thing which I hate when I deal with older people on internet / computer problems.   They don’t know their passwords, any records of them are so muddled that they have dozens of them they insisted we keep trying … and so on.  Or they have multiple user names for the same place.  I have gotten to the point where after the third or fourth attempt that they insist on is the correct one, I demand we change the password.   But then they cannot remember the recovery stuff and so on.  Got that fixed and a new password, but then the struggle becomes getting them to write it all down crossing out the wrong ones.

We ran in circles trying to go from her phone to the computer to where she wanted to go.  I stopped, and look at her computer.   She had all her saved passwords in Chrome I knew as I set it up, but it had been changed to Microsoft Edge, as had a lot of stuff on her computer.  So I got her Windows 11 computer, which I dislike as a program as I find it hard to work with compared to 10, back on Chrome and able to sign into everything. 

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This is the next morning 2 / 22 / 2024 about 7:30 in the morning.  As I was writing the above last evening, I decided to help Ron with supper.  He had the deep fryer out and was deep frying breaded chicken patties and French fries.  Plus he made salads for us.  I ate a full chicken patty burger with pickles and lettuce along with a dash of yellow mustard.    To that I added a lot of French fries.   Plus my salad.  Why did I eat so much you ask, as normally I am a small eater?  A week and half ago I had ten trigger point injections in my back.  Steroids.   They raise heck with my blood sugar and how hungry I get.   After eating, I helped pick stuff up, then went as I get very sleepy after eating went to bed.  

When Ron came to bed he twice had to gently wake me.   I was having bad dreams again, and shouting out, I guess I was trying to call out for him, shouting his name.  It is something I have been doing a lot more of the last 6 to 8 months, shouting out for him.  I must have been having sleep paralysis but what I experience is not being able to turn, move, or able to speak.  When that happens as I struggle to move like I am being restrained I try desperately to force my words out.  Often in my dream they come out slowly slurred and muffled, if at all.  So I try harder with all my might to shout.  What I shout can change, it used to be no no no or don’t hurt me don’t hurt me, or a combination of those.  Now according to Ron I tend to shout his name, and sometimes he will come to the bedroom to ask me if I called him, knowing what that might mean.  

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So back to the story from yesterday.    Got her back into the place she needed, on the sign-up page, and as she started filling it out I left for home.  Ron had gotten home, and I was helping him put away groceries when my phone rang.  She needed to put a picture / scanned image of her passport on the application.  I had given her a multifunction printer, scanner, fax, copier some years ago.  But she couldn’t use it she said as it was out of ink.  Well we don’t need the ink to scan and save an image.  But no matter how I tried to talk her through the procedure it was not working.  So I went back to her house.  Well first the printer was not connected to her router.   But she couldn’t remember the changed password for the router, she just knew that the person who set it up gave it the name of her old router and new password.   So I decided to save that fight for another time.  I suggest we use her phone to take a photo and send the image to her Gmail.   First issue everything on her phone was huge.  Super large font.  Then when we took the picture we couldn’t send it, her settings were to iCloud and not her Gmail, so I again did not want to screw with it.   I just took the picture on my phone, sent it to her Gmail, then I opened her Gmail, saved the image to her computer, went back to the sign-up page and posted the image.  They took it.   I made sure she was good on everything and went home.  I called her back later before supper and she had made it in time and had her spot saved.   

Last note.  Ron and I are finding ourselves on a tight budget right now.  But I know the ink for that brother printer was very inexpensive on Amazon, like $12 dollars for a bunch of it.   I will wait a few days and ask her what model it is and see what I can get off Amazon.   And that was my day.   Hugs.   Scottie