Back Now

Well, yes, and so.

I got back yesterday from a whirlwind vacation: I left here a week ago Thursday, and, in the intervening days, managed to spend two in Cincinnati, four with my parents (more or less), an afternoon of that time in Philadelphia, seeing various historical-type stuff, and a night in Cleveland. The things seen include:
*downtown Cincinnati (the riverfront, where the ballpark is, though we didn’t actually see a game)
*my older nephew’s first football game of the year (he played every down except the kickoffs and kickoff returns)
*the Martin Guitar factory
*in Philadelphia, Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, the Maxfield Parrish mural (done by the Tiffany studios) in the lobby of the Curtis Building, Elfreth’s Alley, Jim’s Steaks, Famous 4th Street Deli, and a cool little bar/restaurant in Northern Liberties
*the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, including, most importantly, the Springsteen exhibit
the Great Lakes Brewing Company’s brewpub, and
*a bit of Oberlin (yes, my alma mater)
All in all, quite fun.

My parents are doing pretty well--they’re about to try another round of some other kind of chemo on my dad, but he’s nearly tapered off the steroids. One of the more amusing moments was watching my mom decide that, oh, okay, she’ll go ahead a buy a new iMac (she has never used the Apple OS before). Her 4-year-old (windowsbox) computer had apparently gotten appallingly slow and creaky, and various people over the years have recommended Macs, but she was on a cruise once with a bunch of Apple devotees, and she vowed never to join the club.

So we all wandered over to the Apple store on Monday, and she poked around, and she looked, and we talked to the salesguy, and she finally said, okay, and walked out with a new computer. She set it up, with some direction and guidance, but one of the beauties of the OS really is its simplicity; after being shown a few things--and saying, oh, I’ll never be able to do this--she promptly started messing around with it. By the time we left three days later, she had figured out how to use three additional applications on her own. She also signed up for a year’s worth of one-on-one training, plus they’ll transfer all her files from the windowsbox, all for about a hundred dollars. I think that will be well worth the money.

But it’s nice to be back home today, even if apparently things at work were mostly big piles of shit hitting industrial-strength fans. (My boss actually emailed and called me, in a panic, and with many apologies about interrupting my vacation; Boss is generally quite good about respecting that boundary, so you know it had to be serious.) I went to a condo board meeting this morning, mostly to educate myself; I started moving winter and summer clothes between the closets; I think I attached my DVD recorder properly; and I caught up with some financial stuff, but otherwise I’ve been sitting around doing a lot of nothing. Which feels mighty fine, I might add. There are a handful of things I probably should do, and I may get to a few of them, but it feels good to just sit here.