I've been away from these pages for too long. This past month has been overly full. (Understatement alert.)

The big thing has been relocating Zoe's mom from Western State Hospital. It was a stressful past few months trying to figure out the right thing for Gerry. In the end the psychiatric doctor said Gerry needed a quiter environment. She is in advanced stages of Alzheimer's and couldn't cognitively process the noise and confusion going on around her. That sparked her outbursts of anger. The new environment, a family care facility, is so much better for her. There are 5 other patients and it's very quiet. This keeps Gerry calmed down. The couple running it are great. As an added bonus they have a 3 year old girl. Gerry loves it when she is around. Everything is not perfect but as a friend of Zoe's said, who has been through this, the important thing is the people taking care of her. It's also only 10 minutes from the ferry on the mainland. No more 3 hour drives.

The other stressor has been finding out one of our cats, Olivia, has renal failure and has 6 months to a year to live. She is only 8 years old. It's been tough watching her waste away. It takes time to make sure she eats and gets hydrated. That means regular trips to the vet to get subcutaneous injections of water under her skin. 200 ml at a time. We will probably start doing it ourselves at some point to keep her stress down. Going to the vet is not Olivia's favorite thing.

Then both my computers died. My desktop went first. Fortunately the repair people were able to image the dead drive and port it all over to the new hard drive so I didn't have to reinstall any software. Whew! Two days after it came back from the shop my laptop died. It had to be sent back to Dell. I lost everything on the hard drive. The OS had to be reinstalled. It came back two days ago and now I'm reloading software. I had been lax on daily backups. Not now! Do you back up your data? Would you miss it if it suddenly left? Back it up!

As soon as I would be ready to post something, all hell would break loose. It doesn't seem to be letting up so I'm going to have to make thinks a little simpler on the blog. The text formatting took extra time. Screw the text formatting. Putting quotes in boxes took extra time. Screw the boxes. Posting information sources took extra time. Screw the information sources. Maybe that will result in more posts. Not that there has been any shortage of shit going on. Some good things too. Stay tuned.