Sleep Glorious Sleep!

For some reason, I didn't sleep well the night before last. I think I got about two hours of sleep before I woke up and couldn't fall, or didn't fall, back to sleep for another 3 hours or so. At which point it was 7 and I needed be out of the house by 9. I woke up at 8:54. At least I got another two hours of sleep. But neither of the alarms I had set on my phone had woken me earlier, as I had hoped they would. Why? Well, because the phone was dead - uncharged. I think the uncharging was partly due to the weather. I don't get awesome ATT reception on the best days - which makes my phone search for service more than I would like, which drains the battery. One reason I didn't sleep so well, I think, was because of a big storm that came through. Said storm probably also caused atmospheric disturbances which made my phone do more searching which drained the battery which led to me waking up 6 minutes before I was supposed to be downtown. Eeek.

Finally, I figured out how long it takes for me to drive from my house to The Smith without much traffic and with zippy parking: 3 minutes. That is pretty quick. Yay. We were meeting to go through some of the stuff in the Tech Cemetery or the Dungeon of Despair. Over the past few months, David and I have been putting things we didn't think were useful anymore (or things about which we had no clue) down into a room in the bottom of the Smith. Even more recently, we spent half an hour cleaning that space up. The next step was to get someone in who might be able to assess what we had and what we might be able to let go of and for how much. That person was Greg, the sound guy. The three of us spent most of an hour looking at things and deciding which pile they needed to live in - the sell pile, the keep pile and the "we have no idea what this is yet" pile. Huzzuh!

Next up, a bit of time was used looking at the HVAC system. It just doesn't seem to be working they way we would expect it to work. And experimentation seemed to prove that was indeed the case. Hopefully we will get some help from the controls people and the whole thing will work as expected. That would be nifty!

I really needed a nap all day, but didn't get one. Instead, I came home, made lunch for mom and then headed out to do laundry. I also decided to tackle the drip in the faucet in the small bathroom. Sigh. First off, I didn't have a wrench large enough to do the job of getting the lock ring off. So I bought one, and a box of washers for around the house. Who knew what size I would need? Turned out, upon returning home, that it was a washerless faucet - there is a cartridge in the faucet that gets replaced when it goes bad. Easy peasy, right? Wrong. Lowes didn't have the replacement cartridge. Not really a surprise since I am sure the faucet was put in many years ago. Huge sigh, though. I got home with a replacement faucet set - which the man assured me would be simple to install. And I think he is right, if I had the right tools and double jointed arms. Meanwhile, the leak continued. The shutoff valve to the cold water doesn't actually shut the water off. I guess that needs replacing too - though a functioning faucet would probably make the problem less pressing. How did I realize the extent of the problem? A puddle of water in the kitchen was a good clue. Glarg and glarp. So, right now, I have a huge pile of mess in the little bathroom and no end in relief in sight. I have written to our former handy person, Justin, but he has not written back. I heard an ad on WNYR about help around the house - Fingerlakes something, but didn't write down the information. Poo.

After the day I had had, I did not feel like cooking, so headed to Ling Ling to grab some Chinese food. Yum! Mom doesn't mind when I don't cook. I had already decided that I didn't want to go out on Tuesday night, so I stayed in and played while mom watched some TV and ate ice cream. Later, she had problems with her new television set. A new remote is, of course, daunting to someone with Alzheimer's. I am not thrilled with the whole set, but it works. And I think I got mom to a place where she was able to do what she wanted to do. Not understanding time doesn't help. She wanted to watch David Letterman and didn't understand that he wasn't available upon demand. I was exhausted from a long, frustrating day and did my best not to hurl the TV from her bedroom window.

All this is to explain why there was no post yesterday. Today is another day. We are having a bit of fall, weather-wise, in beautiful Geneva, NY. We need to get mom's blood tested and run a couple of other errands. And I still have no idea what we are doing for dinner tonight. I do have an avocado that is rapidly going bad...