Welcome To The 21st Century!
Oct. 21st, 2014 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dodger_sisterSo, my mom did go ahead and give up her car. And I am really, really glad she did, for everyone's safety. But she has been driving me nuts ever since. With her health, she doesn’t have the energy to walk very far. So while she does occasionally walk to the bus stop, mostly she has been homebound. In the same way that I only go places if someone drives me. (I call it 80% homebound). And my mother is not in the 21st century, so she doesn’t know how to use technology to expand her walls, like I do. Which means that she has been calling 8 times a day - ‘I just heard a nice quote’, ‘I just saw a funny video’, ‘I just watched a movie, let me tell everything about it’. Also, because we live a block from her, she can easily walk to our house. She’s been stopping by. Every. Single. Day.
She seems to have forgotten the golden rule about ‘no pop-ins’. Just because I am home alone every day, doesn’t mean I’m not busy. One day, she called to say she wanted to stop by on her dog-walk, if I got the message to call her back. I had to get ready for PT, so I just ignored the message. She stopped by anyways. I don’t answer the door when I’m home alone, so I ignored it. Then she lets herself in. I am sitting on the couch and suddenly the door opens. We gave her the security number for emergencies. Stopping by for chitchat is NOT an emergency. I was mean to her then, yelled at her. It is not okay for her to just let herself into my home like that though. I mean, I’m not in here doing indecent things with someone, but what if I was?! Or what if, more likely, I was just busy and didn’t have time for a 20 minute chitchat? Especially on days when I have PT, I try to get an hour of stuff done before going to my appt, because afterwards I am too sore to do anything else.
So my sister and I decided, since Mom’s computer is such a mega-pile of shit, to buy her an IPad. It was used and not that bad of a price. We did have to get her a wireless router too, since she doesn’t even have that yet. I spent 2 hours downloading apps and setting up a myriad of accounts and passwords for her. Then we gave it to her on Sunday. She was actually really grateful. She said ‘thank you’ to us more times than she probably has in our entire lives. She said, “I’ll just be hibernating all winter then, I’ll never leave my bed!” and we were like, “That’s the idea.” It’s not entirely the idea, but once the snow kicks in, even the bus stop will be hard for her, so hopefully this way she will have outside contact. Her desktop computer barely lets her through a page of Facebook before booting her out. Now she has the Facebook app and FB Messenger. She made a post today about her life. She thought it was a novel thing to do. We did look at getting her a Kindle Fire instead, but the IPad was only $50 more, with a slightly bigger screen and, more importantly, IMessage. This means that even though she can’t text from her old phone, she can now text anyone who has an IPhone or IPad. This includes me, my sister and my aunt. I would rather get 20 texts from her a day than I would 8 phonecalls. Her having the ability to text was well worth the extra $50. I have also introduced her to Draw Something and she has already told me how addictive it is. When I send her a drawing, she responds back almost immediately, like she is waiting for me to hit her up. It’s kind of almost adorable to watch her excitement over this technology.
Today I spent 2 hours giving her a basic tutorial. She couldn’t figure out things like how to get out of an app once she was finished in it or how to get back to her home screen or how to make capital letters on the screen-board. So, a very basic tutorial. But I think this is going to be life-changing for her. It was for me. I wouldn’t have made it through the terrible artic winter we had last year if it hadn’t been for my IPad. Of course, after a 2 hour tutoring session today, my throat is worse than ever. It went from simply ‘raw’ to ‘swollen/raw/hard to swallow’. The Sister was home sick again today, as well. Ugh that, man.
She seems to have forgotten the golden rule about ‘no pop-ins’. Just because I am home alone every day, doesn’t mean I’m not busy. One day, she called to say she wanted to stop by on her dog-walk, if I got the message to call her back. I had to get ready for PT, so I just ignored the message. She stopped by anyways. I don’t answer the door when I’m home alone, so I ignored it. Then she lets herself in. I am sitting on the couch and suddenly the door opens. We gave her the security number for emergencies. Stopping by for chitchat is NOT an emergency. I was mean to her then, yelled at her. It is not okay for her to just let herself into my home like that though. I mean, I’m not in here doing indecent things with someone, but what if I was?! Or what if, more likely, I was just busy and didn’t have time for a 20 minute chitchat? Especially on days when I have PT, I try to get an hour of stuff done before going to my appt, because afterwards I am too sore to do anything else.
So my sister and I decided, since Mom’s computer is such a mega-pile of shit, to buy her an IPad. It was used and not that bad of a price. We did have to get her a wireless router too, since she doesn’t even have that yet. I spent 2 hours downloading apps and setting up a myriad of accounts and passwords for her. Then we gave it to her on Sunday. She was actually really grateful. She said ‘thank you’ to us more times than she probably has in our entire lives. She said, “I’ll just be hibernating all winter then, I’ll never leave my bed!” and we were like, “That’s the idea.” It’s not entirely the idea, but once the snow kicks in, even the bus stop will be hard for her, so hopefully this way she will have outside contact. Her desktop computer barely lets her through a page of Facebook before booting her out. Now she has the Facebook app and FB Messenger. She made a post today about her life. She thought it was a novel thing to do. We did look at getting her a Kindle Fire instead, but the IPad was only $50 more, with a slightly bigger screen and, more importantly, IMessage. This means that even though she can’t text from her old phone, she can now text anyone who has an IPhone or IPad. This includes me, my sister and my aunt. I would rather get 20 texts from her a day than I would 8 phonecalls. Her having the ability to text was well worth the extra $50. I have also introduced her to Draw Something and she has already told me how addictive it is. When I send her a drawing, she responds back almost immediately, like she is waiting for me to hit her up. It’s kind of almost adorable to watch her excitement over this technology.
Today I spent 2 hours giving her a basic tutorial. She couldn’t figure out things like how to get out of an app once she was finished in it or how to get back to her home screen or how to make capital letters on the screen-board. So, a very basic tutorial. But I think this is going to be life-changing for her. It was for me. I wouldn’t have made it through the terrible artic winter we had last year if it hadn’t been for my IPad. Of course, after a 2 hour tutoring session today, my throat is worse than ever. It went from simply ‘raw’ to ‘swollen/raw/hard to swallow’. The Sister was home sick again today, as well. Ugh that, man.
