When I got home from practicing yesterday, Jeremy and Alex were sitting in the living room. I had not greeted them yet. In my enthusiasm to hug my son-in-law, I rushed up to him.

He, in turn, held up my grand daughter, Alex. She took one look at this huge hairy man her father was handing her off to and began screaming.

Stranger danger, my son in law explained to me later. It was a new stage, one that a pediatrician recently had inquired whether Alex had reached or not. (Of course she did so a couple of days after this doctor had brought it up).

There aren’t many hairy men in her life so as of last night she was still adjusting and hadn’t quite lost her fear of me.

I met with my boss yesterday. Sarah pointed out that she had never had the experience of looking forward to a meeting with a boss. I know that I am lucky. And I do look forward to sitting down with Rev Jen.

She gave me permission yesterday to use the recently hired tech company to help me solve some laptop issues at home, like successful installation of Windows 10, some glitches with RiteSong and even the over all speed of the computer’s functioning.

Since uninstalling Spyware Terminator and a few other adjustments it does seem like this laptop is bit faster and less like to stall. But I definitely will ask for assistance in upgrading since I figure that Windows 10 can’t be worse than Windows 8. But that may be naive of me, eh?

Sarah and I went to the Farmers Market yesterday. Eileen was at her doctor’s appointment and couldn’t join us. Sarah  misses her extended family and is anxious to cram in as much family time as possible while here. We will probably be making two family excursions so that people can see each other in the next few days, a Jenkins one to the Ann Arbor area and a Hatch one to the Whitehall area.

When we all went and visited my Mom, she was of course glad to see us and especially great grand daughter Alex. When I asked her if she had had enough family time for the day, she indicated that Alex could stay as long as she wanted. Not surprising. And we did stay a bit longer than the usual visit.

I think the family time with the added members is helping my Mom’s cognition and quality of life. That’s nice to watch. It’s unfortunate that in these times we scatter so far from each other, but that’s also part of the fun part for me as well. Elder care is a question under that scenario and soon I will fall under that rubric (the elder to be cared for).

In the meantime I enjoy my family when I see them and make the most of being alive.

I did find two poems by the late Cynthia Macdonald. Here are links.

Robert Underhill’s Present by Cynthia Macdonald : The Poetry Foundation

The Tune He Saw by Cynthia Macdonald : The Poetry Foundation

According to her obit, she was a trained musician (as well as a professor and a trained psychoanalyst who specialized in writers with writers block), so the second poem is especially interesting to me.

My local library owns no books by her so I interlibrary loaned her first book of poetry.

A 21st-Century Migrant’s Essentials: Food, Shelter, Smartphone – NYT

More real life applications of tech… wild new stuff!