We are force feeding Brunswick a puree of canned kitty food with some chicken broth added. He will eat some food from a dish but not enough to strengthen him and he has meds to take which need to be taken with food. His blood work saw his anemia receding, a hopeful sign.

Meanwhile, a few female right-wing neighbors on the island have discovered my activism and enjoy laughing at me behind my back. So I am told by the supremely diplomatic Nadine, my bff. They tell her stuff, not knowing how close we are. One of them had written a critical response (very inadequate  I don’t know why the News-Press bothered to print it but they might have needed a filler). I only know (knew) one of them to talk to. I decided I would ignore the critique. Unless you have an amazing dialogue going, what’s the point? Anyway, today, when I was pulling into our driveway, the one I knew well enough to chat with, was biking by with her husband. I waved at them. They stared stonily ahead and did not respond.

Now, I don’t much care for these people, but I would not be rude to them. It merely showcases how crude and narrow they are. In the words of the immortal Alfred E. Neumann, “What, me worry?”

I was at the supermarket yesterday and saw the sky darken as I got to my car. But I had (curses) forgotten to get Ed some diet Coke. Trust me, this is not something one forgets and lives to tell about it. So I went back. On my second trip to the car, rain started coming down, and the wind kicked up so strongly that I had trouble closing the car door after me. I got home in a driving rain with very poor visibility. It has been years since I experienced that kind of driving. One of the nice things is that I finally learned how to turn the lights on and to manage the windshield wipers. For some reason, the technical changes in cars daunt me. Today when I got in the Hyundai, the A/C was in the stratosphere and the vent panels didn’t divert the air at all. I pulled over and stared at it and found a way to turn it off.

And last night, I thought I might put an invoice I was typing for Ed into a format that would align costs and mileage and such. So I clicked on a table, not realizing that it imposed a grid on every document forever. Ed was annoyed, squared. So somewhere we saw that the grid would not print -- it was just there as a guide. Then the PC wouldn’t recognize the printer -- it seems the 8.1 version of Windows Ed recently downloaded does not recognize the printer. Today he tried to download new drivers but couldn’t get it done. We may have to get a computer guy to do the necessary.

Meanwhile, today I asked the grid question on Google and got an answer and got rid of the grid. It appears I am not the only one ever sandbagged by Microsoft.

Until we get a printer connection, I will have to e mail the invoice to Ed and he will open it on his laptop, copy it into Word (I will do that for him) and send it to the printer which still loves his laptop.

Here’s a tip -- if you are tempted to get the latest version of a master program, be aware that devices that connect to it may stop being recognized.

xx, Teal