Back in Indiana.
Nov. 30th, 2006 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
napoleonherselfI have completed my task of spending under an hour getting the family's wireless Internet all working.
Stupid five-hundred-mile drives.
Mechamom and I drove out there Tuesday; we got to the resort about 9 that evening, and just crashed for the night. The resort is in Stonewall Jackson Park Thingie and is gorgeous. Ordinary enough rooms, and a spa and sauna and so on which I'm sure are lovely for those who like them, but wow, what a view of the lake and the mountains. And deer! Deer everywhere when you look at dawnish or duskish. They apparently really like the golf course grass, because there were oodles there. Especially in the sand traps. Silly deer, sand isn't tasty!
On Wednesday morning we set off to my family's house in Buckhannon. On the way we got a little confused as to whether we had missed a turn, and so we stopped at a conveniently-located post office and mechamom went in and asked. The woman in there had no idea what she meant by "Route 20" (which was less than 10 miles east of there), but she noted that if we just got back on "the four-lane" and headed east, we'd find Buckhannon. "The four-lane". Oy. (Side note: mechamom says that when she was making the hotel reservations, she asked the woman on the phone how big a town Buckhannon was. "Oh, it's a good-sized town," the woman replied. "Fifty thousand people?" mechamom asked. "Oh, no, no," the woman answered. "Twenty thousand?" mechamom pressed on. "Oh, no," the woman replied. And so on. Finally, "Five thousand?" mechamom offered. "Well... maybe..." said the woman. Five-ish thousand. "Good-sized" town. Oy.)
We pushed on and did find the house, and I quickly said hi to everyone and then got to work. It turns out that:
After I got it all working nice and wireless, I just hung out with mom and grandma and grandpa a while waiting for Jeff to get back from his tech class -- Regina was home from school that day, but apparently spends all her time watching TV in another room by herself, even when the same show is being watched on TV in another room. She didn't seem too interested in my presence, which kind of surprised me. I'm not really hurt, though, because she is fairly mentally messed-up, and you can't expect normal reactions from such people -- they may very well give them, but you can't expect them.
Mom's shorter than I remember, and she seems more worn-out, too, though that's not entirely surprising (she is 50, and taking care of two children and two parents). She's starting to look more like Grandma, or maybe I just never noticed the resemblance until I saw them in the same room again for the first time in like five years. I always thought she looked like me and Regina, but now not so much. I made sure to bring her a picture of me and mecha and mechamom and so on, because she had especially requested it; I forgot to ask mechamom if she remembered just WHEN the picture was taken, but I can do that tomorrowish and then mention it to mom on the phone soon. Or online if I happen to see her or Jeff on AIM.
Grandma seems to be doing okay; when she walks, it's with tiny, awkward, shuffling steps, but I don't know that that's anything new. She doesn't seem to be in any kind of pain or discomfort, and she's still able to cheerfully shuffle off to wash the dishes, so. I kind of expected to get some kind of Jesus-related talk while I was there, but either she's mellowed on that a bit or I just lucked out a bit. Most of her conversation was about how the family was and about what it was like when she worked at the local radio station decades ago.
Grandpa is not doing so hot due to Alzheimer's. When I first came in, his first reaction to being introduced to me was "I thought she already lived here", though I guess that could be because Regina looks an awful lot like me. He mainly just napped on the couch there in the living room, occasionally sitting up to announce that he was sick and that he hurt. Apparently he says that a lot, because the responses he got were mainly in the vein of "yeah, yeah, you always say that". I remember him as being very quiet and very easy-going, so it's rather sad how he's ending up cranky and confused.
The whole thing was sad, really. Sad as in an actual emotional reaction, not as in "ha ha that's soooo sad ha ha". The house was so much smaller than I remembered from when I was little, and those five people are really crammed in there. Also the whole thing is kind of falling apart. The same old furniture that was old when I was nine is still holding up remarkably well, but the floors seem almost like they're about to fall through in places, and there's a hole in the ceiling where Jeff really did fall through from the attic, and the porch supports and walls are visibly tilted and/or worn.
I'm really worried about them now. This is a random middle-of-the-post place to mention it, but it's where my brain is. None of them is employed and all they have is mom's savings, and whatever grandma and grandpa have, and that house. And the house is simply not going to hold up for another fifty years, maybe not even with massive repairs. Which they can't afford anyway. And even if they were to sell the house/land or whatever then how long would that money last them? Maybe not long. Maybe no one will be willing to pay much.
West Virginia is utterly utterly gorgeous country, but oh, the poverty.
Jeff got home around three and joined in on the spending time with me. He seems a little taller, although that might be my imagination; he's grown a beard and now wears glasses, and maybe that's what makes him look a lot older than I remember. He's 21 now, and he does kind of look it. Of course, his speech impediment still makes him sound younger, and it's probably a big part of why he's been so unable to find work. Maybe if he likes the electrician-type classes he's been taking, and completes the program, he can get apprenticed to someone and get into the business that way. You don't care if the guy who comes to fix your wiring talks well, for the most part; what you care about is whether he fixes your wiring.
Grandma had I guess a cassette of Johnny Cash music and she had it playing on a little radio type thing in the kitchen for a bit while mom and Jeff and I talked in the living room. Apparently they hate it, but I loved it, because hey, Johnny Cash. Also mom heated me up some leftover ham spaghetti in the kitchen for lunch, which sounds gross but was actually really good. It was the same recipe she used to make for chicken spaghetti, only using the leftover ham from Thanksgiving. In the kitchen I admired the wallpaper, which is unchanged since last I was there, and I think since mom's childhood, even. I HATE that I couldn't find my digital camera to take with me; I desperately want that wallpaper photographed and preserved. It's one of those patterns you just don't see anymore, with mermaids and drummers and things all done in shades of rust and gold, and it's made of vinyl or something and it's simply gorgeous. Pretty much everything in that house is vintage, from the bathroom cabinets to the brown-and-orange living room shag carpeting, but that kitchen wallpaper is simply amazing. Yes I just typed about wallpaper for like five minutes straight. IT IS THAT AWESOME.
Mom also showed me how half the two-car garage had been converted into a shed to hold a lot of the stuff that she brought from California. Their old desktop computer was there, and I decided to take it back with me. Maybe I can get it working and recover any data they have on it; maybe I can just reformat the hard drive and cannibalize for components. Either way.
There are some really windy mountain roads between the house and the hotel, so mechamom picked me up early that evening (still Wednesday) in order to drive back in the not-pitch-dark. When she pulled into the driveway to get me, of course, she also had a lovely trunkful of presents for everyone that we had picked up in the Greenwood mall before leaving Indianapolis. Mom was instructed to hide them until Christmas, because we got an item for Jeff that the JCPenney moron had forgotten to remove the ink-spewing antitheft tag from, and the nearest JCPenney to the house was fifty miles away in Bridgeport, so we had to bring the item back home with us to have the tag removed. Mechamom will have it shipped to the house once that is done and then Jeff will the the present that I hope he likes although he may not but even if he doesn't he should get some use out of it anyway. Hooray for run-on sentences!
I gave a hug goodbye to everyone who wanted one, shook a fist at Jeff and grinningly ordered him to be good, and then mechamom drove us back to the resort. We had dinner in the resort restaurant ("Stillwaters"; the bar, where we didn't go because it was a "your addiction to a deadly substance is more important than my FUCKING LUNGS, you INCONSIDERATE ASSHOLE, and YES I MEAN ANY SMOKERS READING THIS WHO SMOKE IN PUBLIC, WHY IS YOUR ADDICTION MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVERYONE ELSE'S HEALTH" zone, was named T.J. Muskie's), stopped off at the gift shop there and got a few items, including a t-shirt for me. It is obvious tourist crap, with a chintzy fake-vintage look (including a "pre-nicked" screened-on design), but I like it. That night we went to bed early because we planned an early start the next morning (Thursday, i.e. today).
Thursday morning we got up at 6:30 and drove to the golf lodge at the top of a nearby hill in the resort in order to watch the sun rise. It was a gorgeous sunrise, and another missed opportunity to take a picture with my AWOL camera. Pinks, blues, golds, all peeking through the trees and bouncing off the clouds. Then we drove around looking at deer, and managed to stop, with the car window down, less than 15 feet from two perfectly still and picture-perfect deer, who merely stood in the brush by the side of the road and looked calmly back at us. NEEDED. CAMERA. But oh well. Back to the resort, and we had the free breakfast buffet there for the second day in a row, and then we were off, bidding farewell to the deer and the not-seen-but-supposedly-in-evidence bears as we went.
On the way back we stopped at some fancy art glass place that I guess is pretty famous, it started with an F, I forget its name. We were supposed to look at Zanesville Pottery which is also pretty famous I guess, and I was looking forward to that because pottery is awesome. However, SOMEONE decided to skip the giant building that said ZANESVILLE POTTERY in five-foot-high letters and go on to the atual town of Zanesville, which had NO POTTERY. This despite the fact that someone else pointed out that this was almost certainly the right place given the fact that it was NAMED the VERY THING WE WERE LOOKING FOR. Bah. Next time I'm all the way across Ohio, I guess.
As we crossed Ohio we ran into the storm front that is basically sweeping the nation, and by the time we got into Indiana we were facing some pretty heavy rain. We did stop for food shortly before the rain hit, in, um, Dayton I think? The place was named Rudy's Smokehouse Barbecue. It is apparently run by some religious guy and closed on Sundays, but I suggest you check it out if you're ever near possiblyDayton. Good pulled chicken.
We left the resort at maybe 8:30ish, and with the stops for glass and food (but not glass IN food, thankfully), made it back to mechamom's place at about 4:30. Then Quentin took me down here to Bloomington, and he and mecha and I got Chinese food, and then he dropped us off and headed back up to Indianapolis. And here I am typing. The end.
Epilogue: I left an apartment that had a broken garbage disposal and no clothes washer or dryer. I came home to an apartment with a brand-new garbage disposal and a state-of-the-art GE washer and dryer. So, you know, aces on that. Even if I also came home to a bathroom towel bar that flew off the wall the moment I touched it.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I must (finally) stop typing, and do some laundry.
(Also, yes, yes, I know. tl;dr. Here's a suggestion: don't be a rude asshole. I don't give a shit if you're too important to deign to let your eyes wander across my posted words; announcing that you are won't make me post any less. Besides, why do you think there's an LJ-cut there?)
Stupid five-hundred-mile drives.
Mechamom and I drove out there Tuesday; we got to the resort about 9 that evening, and just crashed for the night. The resort is in Stonewall Jackson Park Thingie and is gorgeous. Ordinary enough rooms, and a spa and sauna and so on which I'm sure are lovely for those who like them, but wow, what a view of the lake and the mountains. And deer! Deer everywhere when you look at dawnish or duskish. They apparently really like the golf course grass, because there were oodles there. Especially in the sand traps. Silly deer, sand isn't tasty!
On Wednesday morning we set off to my family's house in Buckhannon. On the way we got a little confused as to whether we had missed a turn, and so we stopped at a conveniently-located post office and mechamom went in and asked. The woman in there had no idea what she meant by "Route 20" (which was less than 10 miles east of there), but she noted that if we just got back on "the four-lane" and headed east, we'd find Buckhannon. "The four-lane". Oy. (Side note: mechamom says that when she was making the hotel reservations, she asked the woman on the phone how big a town Buckhannon was. "Oh, it's a good-sized town," the woman replied. "Fifty thousand people?" mechamom asked. "Oh, no, no," the woman answered. "Twenty thousand?" mechamom pressed on. "Oh, no," the woman replied. And so on. Finally, "Five thousand?" mechamom offered. "Well... maybe..." said the woman. Five-ish thousand. "Good-sized" town. Oy.)
We pushed on and did find the house, and I quickly said hi to everyone and then got to work. It turns out that:
- Verizon is a bunch of morons, and they specifically say in the online FAQ that the Westell 6100 modem's little internal webpage thing looks one way, when they know perfectly well that there are TWO ways it can look. This modem had the mysterious second way, so the online thing was useless, but when I called the Verizon helpline, they completely knew what I was talking about when I described the page. PLZ UPDATE ONLINE HELP TO ADMIT THAT THERE ARE TWO VERSIONS FLOATING AROUND KTHX.
- Verizon is a bunch of utter morons, and they shipped the DSL kit with an install disc whose cutesy little flash install utility won't complete. It gets partway through and then stops loading and you get a window with a perfectly servicable title bar and then the rest of the window is white. Which, of course, necessitated a call to tech support even if the first point, above, hadn't been true.
- Verizon is a bunch of UTTER FUCKING MORONS, and the internal IP they have the modem take -- 192.168.1.1 -- is EXACTLY the same IP that Linksys routers give themselves by default. The router couldn't get an IP from the modem until I manually changed the IP that the router gives itself. Guess what IS NOT MENTIONED AT ALL on Verizon's troubleshooting page for Linksys-device-related woes? Yeah. "Most issues with Home Networking can be resolved by restarting your computer, your router, and your DSL modem" MY FUCKING ASS.
After I got it all working nice and wireless, I just hung out with mom and grandma and grandpa a while waiting for Jeff to get back from his tech class -- Regina was home from school that day, but apparently spends all her time watching TV in another room by herself, even when the same show is being watched on TV in another room. She didn't seem too interested in my presence, which kind of surprised me. I'm not really hurt, though, because she is fairly mentally messed-up, and you can't expect normal reactions from such people -- they may very well give them, but you can't expect them.
Mom's shorter than I remember, and she seems more worn-out, too, though that's not entirely surprising (she is 50, and taking care of two children and two parents). She's starting to look more like Grandma, or maybe I just never noticed the resemblance until I saw them in the same room again for the first time in like five years. I always thought she looked like me and Regina, but now not so much. I made sure to bring her a picture of me and mecha and mechamom and so on, because she had especially requested it; I forgot to ask mechamom if she remembered just WHEN the picture was taken, but I can do that tomorrowish and then mention it to mom on the phone soon. Or online if I happen to see her or Jeff on AIM.
Grandma seems to be doing okay; when she walks, it's with tiny, awkward, shuffling steps, but I don't know that that's anything new. She doesn't seem to be in any kind of pain or discomfort, and she's still able to cheerfully shuffle off to wash the dishes, so. I kind of expected to get some kind of Jesus-related talk while I was there, but either she's mellowed on that a bit or I just lucked out a bit. Most of her conversation was about how the family was and about what it was like when she worked at the local radio station decades ago.
Grandpa is not doing so hot due to Alzheimer's. When I first came in, his first reaction to being introduced to me was "I thought she already lived here", though I guess that could be because Regina looks an awful lot like me. He mainly just napped on the couch there in the living room, occasionally sitting up to announce that he was sick and that he hurt. Apparently he says that a lot, because the responses he got were mainly in the vein of "yeah, yeah, you always say that". I remember him as being very quiet and very easy-going, so it's rather sad how he's ending up cranky and confused.
The whole thing was sad, really. Sad as in an actual emotional reaction, not as in "ha ha that's soooo sad ha ha". The house was so much smaller than I remembered from when I was little, and those five people are really crammed in there. Also the whole thing is kind of falling apart. The same old furniture that was old when I was nine is still holding up remarkably well, but the floors seem almost like they're about to fall through in places, and there's a hole in the ceiling where Jeff really did fall through from the attic, and the porch supports and walls are visibly tilted and/or worn.
I'm really worried about them now. This is a random middle-of-the-post place to mention it, but it's where my brain is. None of them is employed and all they have is mom's savings, and whatever grandma and grandpa have, and that house. And the house is simply not going to hold up for another fifty years, maybe not even with massive repairs. Which they can't afford anyway. And even if they were to sell the house/land or whatever then how long would that money last them? Maybe not long. Maybe no one will be willing to pay much.
West Virginia is utterly utterly gorgeous country, but oh, the poverty.
Jeff got home around three and joined in on the spending time with me. He seems a little taller, although that might be my imagination; he's grown a beard and now wears glasses, and maybe that's what makes him look a lot older than I remember. He's 21 now, and he does kind of look it. Of course, his speech impediment still makes him sound younger, and it's probably a big part of why he's been so unable to find work. Maybe if he likes the electrician-type classes he's been taking, and completes the program, he can get apprenticed to someone and get into the business that way. You don't care if the guy who comes to fix your wiring talks well, for the most part; what you care about is whether he fixes your wiring.
Grandma had I guess a cassette of Johnny Cash music and she had it playing on a little radio type thing in the kitchen for a bit while mom and Jeff and I talked in the living room. Apparently they hate it, but I loved it, because hey, Johnny Cash. Also mom heated me up some leftover ham spaghetti in the kitchen for lunch, which sounds gross but was actually really good. It was the same recipe she used to make for chicken spaghetti, only using the leftover ham from Thanksgiving. In the kitchen I admired the wallpaper, which is unchanged since last I was there, and I think since mom's childhood, even. I HATE that I couldn't find my digital camera to take with me; I desperately want that wallpaper photographed and preserved. It's one of those patterns you just don't see anymore, with mermaids and drummers and things all done in shades of rust and gold, and it's made of vinyl or something and it's simply gorgeous. Pretty much everything in that house is vintage, from the bathroom cabinets to the brown-and-orange living room shag carpeting, but that kitchen wallpaper is simply amazing. Yes I just typed about wallpaper for like five minutes straight. IT IS THAT AWESOME.
Mom also showed me how half the two-car garage had been converted into a shed to hold a lot of the stuff that she brought from California. Their old desktop computer was there, and I decided to take it back with me. Maybe I can get it working and recover any data they have on it; maybe I can just reformat the hard drive and cannibalize for components. Either way.
There are some really windy mountain roads between the house and the hotel, so mechamom picked me up early that evening (still Wednesday) in order to drive back in the not-pitch-dark. When she pulled into the driveway to get me, of course, she also had a lovely trunkful of presents for everyone that we had picked up in the Greenwood mall before leaving Indianapolis. Mom was instructed to hide them until Christmas, because we got an item for Jeff that the JCPenney moron had forgotten to remove the ink-spewing antitheft tag from, and the nearest JCPenney to the house was fifty miles away in Bridgeport, so we had to bring the item back home with us to have the tag removed. Mechamom will have it shipped to the house once that is done and then Jeff will the the present that I hope he likes although he may not but even if he doesn't he should get some use out of it anyway. Hooray for run-on sentences!
I gave a hug goodbye to everyone who wanted one, shook a fist at Jeff and grinningly ordered him to be good, and then mechamom drove us back to the resort. We had dinner in the resort restaurant ("Stillwaters"; the bar, where we didn't go because it was a "your addiction to a deadly substance is more important than my FUCKING LUNGS, you INCONSIDERATE ASSHOLE, and YES I MEAN ANY SMOKERS READING THIS WHO SMOKE IN PUBLIC, WHY IS YOUR ADDICTION MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVERYONE ELSE'S HEALTH" zone, was named T.J. Muskie's), stopped off at the gift shop there and got a few items, including a t-shirt for me. It is obvious tourist crap, with a chintzy fake-vintage look (including a "pre-nicked" screened-on design), but I like it. That night we went to bed early because we planned an early start the next morning (Thursday, i.e. today).
Thursday morning we got up at 6:30 and drove to the golf lodge at the top of a nearby hill in the resort in order to watch the sun rise. It was a gorgeous sunrise, and another missed opportunity to take a picture with my AWOL camera. Pinks, blues, golds, all peeking through the trees and bouncing off the clouds. Then we drove around looking at deer, and managed to stop, with the car window down, less than 15 feet from two perfectly still and picture-perfect deer, who merely stood in the brush by the side of the road and looked calmly back at us. NEEDED. CAMERA. But oh well. Back to the resort, and we had the free breakfast buffet there for the second day in a row, and then we were off, bidding farewell to the deer and the not-seen-but-supposedly-in-evidence bears as we went.
On the way back we stopped at some fancy art glass place that I guess is pretty famous, it started with an F, I forget its name. We were supposed to look at Zanesville Pottery which is also pretty famous I guess, and I was looking forward to that because pottery is awesome. However, SOMEONE decided to skip the giant building that said ZANESVILLE POTTERY in five-foot-high letters and go on to the atual town of Zanesville, which had NO POTTERY. This despite the fact that someone else pointed out that this was almost certainly the right place given the fact that it was NAMED the VERY THING WE WERE LOOKING FOR. Bah. Next time I'm all the way across Ohio, I guess.
As we crossed Ohio we ran into the storm front that is basically sweeping the nation, and by the time we got into Indiana we were facing some pretty heavy rain. We did stop for food shortly before the rain hit, in, um, Dayton I think? The place was named Rudy's Smokehouse Barbecue. It is apparently run by some religious guy and closed on Sundays, but I suggest you check it out if you're ever near possiblyDayton. Good pulled chicken.
We left the resort at maybe 8:30ish, and with the stops for glass and food (but not glass IN food, thankfully), made it back to mechamom's place at about 4:30. Then Quentin took me down here to Bloomington, and he and mecha and I got Chinese food, and then he dropped us off and headed back up to Indianapolis. And here I am typing. The end.
Epilogue: I left an apartment that had a broken garbage disposal and no clothes washer or dryer. I came home to an apartment with a brand-new garbage disposal and a state-of-the-art GE washer and dryer. So, you know, aces on that. Even if I also came home to a bathroom towel bar that flew off the wall the moment I touched it.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I must (finally) stop typing, and do some laundry.
(Also, yes, yes, I know. tl;dr. Here's a suggestion: don't be a rude asshole. I don't give a shit if you're too important to deign to let your eyes wander across my posted words; announcing that you are won't make me post any less. Besides, why do you think there's an LJ-cut there?)
