Life: Gina’s birthday was a success. She liked the gift I bought her and the ones her mother and my mom, Vicki, sent. We also caught Nurse Betty which was a lot of fun. We were going to dinner at Bordino’s (a nice Italian place), but we’d already eaten at a better place in Tonitown the night before. So I guess we’ll have an excuse to eat out this weekend.
I just remembered that I have to visit my father tonight. That’ll be an ordeal. My father, who has always been a little nuts, is getting worse and worse (physically and mentally). He has what his doctors think are the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Because of this, he has a tendency to tell you the same thing he just told you, over and over again. He also (and this is perhaps unrelated) has a tendency to obsess about certain things (he has a pet list of things to obsess about, which he rotates through every month or so). Right now, his obsession is with visiting the farm where he lived until his health recently took a turn for the worse. I promised to take him out there, so we can be bitten by ticks and grab a few things from his old house.
Alzheimer’s destroy’s the memory of recent events, so you can never trust my dad’s impressions of things (though he is always certain they are true and it’s pointless to argue with him about them). Right now, he’s also obsessing about the power of attorney that my sister had him sign earlier this year when he was hospitalized and near death. The whole point of getting this legal leverage was to take care of him and ensure that someone was able to make decisions for him if he were unable to do so for himself (and, in a lot of cases, he is unable to make decisions because his damaged memory makes it hard for him to understand the implications of things). But now he’s convinced that my sister tricked him into signing that document in order for him to be released from the hospital. It is this mixture of confusion, paranoia, and obsession that drives his every move. Part of this is from the disease, and part of it is from god knows what else.
I didn’t like my dad much when I was growing up, at least not after I hit my teenage years. He could be very harsh and narrow about things. And since I was always curious and interested in new ideas and ways of doing things, this put us a loggerheads on more than a few occasions. During parts of my young adult life, we weren’t on speaking terms for half a year at time. But, oddly enough, I find myself unable to hold any of this against him, because, in a very real sense, the “him” that did these things is either no longer with us or quickly becomming a thing of the past. My father today doesn’t remember any of our difficulties. He doesn’t remember my wife’s name. He doesn’t remember what day it is or what month.
These days, he lives in an appartment in Huntsville, a small farming down about 40 miles from here (Fayetteville). Before, he’d lived in his own house out on a large farm of around 300 acres. The move into town has been hard on him–a big blow to his independance. But he’s 83 (will be 84 in less than a month) and very frail. He can no longer drive. The appartment is essentially a stopping-off point between the farm and (as they used to call them when I was a kid) a rest home.
All of this is very sad stuff, but I don’t know what to do with it other than state it plainly.
Work: I spent most of yesterday installing and configuring client software for Meeting Maker, a calendar sharing software that we’re going to start using (many departments on campus are using it already. Though I don’t like it as much as Kalendar (the KDE calendar program for Linux), which I was using previously, it does make sharing information easy and it prints out nicely too. I think our staff will dig it once they get over the fear it seems to have inspired in some.
The first of our new lab machines came in today: a Gateway GP7-933 (933Mhz, Pentium III). It’s a nice box, though Gateway has adopted a look that is a bad implimentation of the imac idea. They’ve tried adding color to their white, industrial-looking boxes by rounding them off a bit and adding these stupid gray panels on the front and the top. The result is an ugly two-tone box. The older design, while far from attractive, at least had the integrity of nearly pure functionalism; it was just a big white rectangle with a power button and some drive bays. But, aesthetics (or a bad attempt at aesthetics) asside, it’s a nice box with plenty of speed and lots of nice features (DVD-ROM, Zip250, 20GB of hard drive space, 128MB of RAM, nice video and audio cards, and USB ports on the front and back for easy access). And besides all that, it’s brand new, so I’m enjoying configuring it installing software on it. It’s nice to start from scratch with a machine that didn’t wind up here because it had gotten too old to be of use in one of the staff offices. :)
I’m hoping another one of these will arrive today. We have six more comming, and I’m ordering two more today (though those will be for staff, not for the lab).