I realize it's been a while since I spun a good yarn, but the past few days I have had my mom staying with us, and THAT is enough to fuel a yarn if ANYTHING ever was.
It starts last week when my sister, Mrs PO was over at mom's trying to discover why mom's PC seems to randomly shut itself off for no apparent reason. I imagine she scoured the house for garage sale items with attached legions of demons or mischievous Smurf dolls before noticing a correlation between the ancient prehistoric freezer mom has switching on or off, and the lights dimming and the PC simply going POOF.
But it couldn't be this pleistocene menace freezer that is the problems, it HAS to be the top-end PC I built mom.
Please excuse me while I roll my eyes and peer at the back of my skull for a moment or two....
There.
Anyhoo, It gets decided that I'll come out and pick mom up along with her PC and bring the both of them back to my house for a few days.
Not decided by ME mind you, but decided nonetheless.
I mean, I've got a giant truck that chugs gas as if from a fire hose and an electric scooter to ride up to mom's door, Why shouldn't I go collect her, haul all her stuff to the truck, load it, help her climb up into the truck and then load my scooter?
All from the back of my scooter, mind you. AND, this was before I had constructed the steel ramp that now graces the hitch platform on the back of my ApostaTruck, so I was using a rickety board to drive my scooter up. Scary.
Good thing my daughter ang met that nice young man, Frodo, he came along and helped.
Mom is about four foot six, and weighs practically nothing. she's got severe spinal curvature and her ribcage has settled down onto her pelvis, but fortunately it has done so relatively straight, no humps or twists.
Mom is very nearly deaf, has Alzheimer's, AND is in a soul killing, mind dulling cult we all know and despise so she's got THAT going for her, lol.
I know it's not her fault, and that it frustrates her as much as me, but what all that means is that she tends to quietly ruminate on things that make no sense until she just bursts forth with her thought or question right while you are trying to talk to someone else or are an the phone.
Her themes are fairly consistent:
JW stuff: it's unfair I have turned Angie and Becky 'against the truth,' she loves me like a son, but I AM the evil slave, plus spewing whatever the WT line is that week. plus wild fantasies about the new world "in the new world I'm going to live in acabin for a hundred years and all the woodland creatures will be my friends, then I'm going to go to Africa and ride tigers like they were horses but they won't bite me because it's the new world and they eat grass with their pointy pointy non-grass eating teeth, then i'm going to have a pet [whatever innapropriate beast she has seen most recently on TV]!
Criticisms of Angie: She's too heavy, too thin, she can't life that, shes a girl! Angie don't work out, you'll get muscles and they aren't feminine. You should let me do your hair, I learned a perfectly good way of doing it back in the thirties... Are you really going to wear THAT?!?! DAVE! tell your daughter she cannot wear that out of the house!
Discomfort with Angie's relationship: Dave?!?! Have you noticed how those two hold hands everywhere they go? Why haven't you put a stop to it? They will attract too much attention from mean kids who will target them for random violence. I'm not comfortable with her going places with him in the car unchaperoned, and the way they watch movies on the couch is immoral, they should be a few feet apart.
Asking questions about people that I just answered moments ago: Becky works until when? Where is Angie? Is frodo coming over tonight? Where are we eating? Are Sarah and Jeff married?
Changing plans: Every plan is subject to change about a Googleplex times even as you are driving to the restaurant. 'no, lets not go there, lets go here, or not. I want to go home tonight, no tomorrow night, no I'll stay another three days, no I want to go home last week, blah blah blah.
Her Appearance: She wears a squirrel on her head, she calls it a wig, but it's a squirrel. she has plucked off all her eyebrows and needs to draw new ones on before she can go anywhere. She is afraid people will think she look like an 'old lady' and she's 78. There's times she won't go anywhere because it's too hot to wear the squirrel, and it takes two days to wash and set her hair for any non-squirrel outing.
During these times, the Squirrel lives on a fake styrofoam head that seriously creeps me out because she puts it in our livingroom on a surface where it is just the right height that at a glance it constantly looks like someone is standing there.
Creepy.
Any time I take a picture of anything, which I do frequently for my work; she notices the flash and makes a mad face at me because she is certain I am snapping surreptitious pictures of her. Even though I'm at my work table up to my elbows in laptop guts and taking a quick snap of which screws went where so I won't wind up with 'pocket screws' when I get the stupid thing back together, I was obviously sneaking a photo of her because what ELSE would anyone do with a camera?
Senior Moments: Dave? Are they building something there? (my reply: no mother, those girders were growing there naturally and them guys are pruning them into a office building)
DAVE? when did YOU grow a beard?!?! (uh, only since 1997, mom)
OK, so you have a van, a car, a boat and a truck, which is this?
This is the truck, mother. (like it would be the boat? and the car died two years ago)
(Looks at the back seat) But is there more behind this? (like she wasn't just standing back there asking me a million questions about how I load the scooter and whether it would really stay there on that platform)
Yes mother, there is a huge bed back there.
A what?
Ok, so this is the van, no wait. what is this again?
She will periodically demand to know what is going on this very instant, usually when our attention is needed to mop up a spill, pick up knocked-over things or otherwise respond immediately. She wants us to stop what we are doing, look her right in the face, explain what the commotion is, and not get peeved.
I love my mom. 'Like a mother' I should add, to duplicate the slur she used on me, so I show as much patience as I can. At first it's all so dear and funny, you just smile and say 'no mother' and try to explain. But there comes a time when even Mother Teresa would snap at this woman.
She sits in the room we made for her reading, which is nice, but she's also carrying on a dialog with herself in her deafness-isolated stream of consciousness which is based on assumptions that don't hold and an incomplete understanding of what is going on.
Eventually she comes quietly drifting out to stand behind my wheelchair and peer at whatever is on my PC screen for a few moments before suddenly saying my name very loudly and making me jump right out of my plus-size skin.
Then she takes the internal dialog that she has in progress and regurgitates it all over me without starting at the beginning or explaining anything.
DAVE! When Becky wakes up, I want to show her the right way to do laundry!
?
Um, Becky is at work, and why do you think she needs instruction in that?
I NOTICED THAT THE PILLOWCASES in your room do NOT MATCH.
(you were in our room?)
That's because we like different kinds.
Huh?
That's because we like different kinds.
You're of two different minds?
That's because we like different kinds.
There's a mouse with mini-blinds?
That's because we like different kinds.
I'm sorry, I'm just not getting it.
That's because we like different kinds!
Oh! well why didn't you just SAY SO, and you don't have to yell, I'm not deaf, you know.
But, if you swear under your breath after this ordeal, she hears it perfectly and takes you to task for it!
Oh, look there's the back of my head again. Look at those veins throb, one's gonna pop any day soon now...
It's like constantly waiting for the hammer to drop, and knowing it won't make any sense when it finally does.
Mom wasn't always this way, and the day will come when she will be gone and I will miss her dearly, these little annoyances will be forgotten like my dad's annoying defects are no longer mentioned since his passing.
I try to enjoy my time with mom to the best of my ability, she likes to play cards and dominoes, but that's about ALL she enjoys anymore.
But there comes a time when a fella's played as much dominoes as anybody can take, cycled through all the card games he likes about a zillion times, and is all worn out from trying not to let her see JWD on the screen because it would be impossible to discuss, hiding in the garage building a steel ramp, and waiting for the next outburst of non-contextual questioning.
Time to look into that PC!
Aside from obvious signs of tampering by one of her other sons, DF; whom I do not recognize as my brother, the PC is fine. Needs a good cleaning, but nothing wrong with it.
DF had set an 'Active Desktop' that no longer worked, and cluttered the drive with useless files like pictures of his vile disgusting kids, and stuff about colon irrigation. I was surprised at how his oldest daughter, Welfare Queen has plumped out, I mean YUCK.
Mom says: "but she still has a pretty face, it's a fat face, but she's a pretty fat girl."
OMG, mom CAN be pretty funny!
So I put all of DF's crap on a CD and deleted it from mom's PC, I mean the women just barely knows how to get to her shanghai game, and is easily thrown by idiots completely reworking all her settings and relocating all her shortcuts.
Nothing wrong with her PC, so I advised her to let that clunking freezer die and buy one that doesn't dim all the lights in her apt every time it switches on, and drove her home.
I can't believe I used to feel a little lonely here by myself so much, now I can see Peace and Quiet for what it is!
Ahh, sweet peace, until the phone starts ringing, that is.
Roller.