Mopey Monday Miscellanei

Today is one of those mopey days. The sun is out and it is nice outside, but my motivation to get going is lacking. Seems like those kind of days happen sometmes. Maybe the solution is to add an extra day each week that can be used in any way one chooses. If this is a good day to mope around and do little else, you can use the extra day as a mope day. Of course, there is always the ongoing issue of using your "personal/mope" day too eary in the week and then discovering that it was really needed later in the week. {*grin*}

The discussion of mope days reminded me of a gentleman I haven't thought of in years. Paul was a work colleague long ago. He was very senior in the company at the time I knew him. He had worked essentially his whole life at the company, was one of the original 10 employees of what had become a Fortune 100 company, and with his seniority, he accumulated vacation time at a rate exceeding 1 day a week. The problem that Paul had was that he was not often in the mood to take time off. So he was always up against the corporate cap on accumulated vacation time. The entire time I knew him, he had to take one day a week off or lose the paid day off as he hit the corporate cap. Paul was one of those people who couldn't stand the idea of "donating" the day back to the company, so he spent some time programming a spreadsheet/database to automatically chose which days would be best for him to take off. He would then put in the paperwork for those days but still come to work as if it was a normal day. It pleased him not to "donate" the day to the company and yet not have to skip work for a day. He would have loved the similar problems associated with the personal/mope day idea.

Easter was good here. L was home and we had Easter dinner at Mom's. I suspect Mom was pretty tired after wheeling around preparing the meal in a wheel chair. Since she can't leave the house yet, she wanted to have Easter dinner at her place. So I did the shopping and then pulled some stuff out of the freezers Saturday night and came over early Sunday to help with the prep and setup. L and MIL both came over after church so we could follow the long standing family tradition of eating too much on Easter Sunday. MIL hurt her shoulder/arm in the blizzard#1 and blizzard#2 aftermath and so isn't able to use one arm right now. Hopefully that will get better when she starts theraapy later this week. Since Mom had the home care nurse coming by later in the day to change the surgical dressings, MIL was in discomfort with her arm, and L had to get ready to head back to the mountains, we were done and had it all cleaned up before 3pm. 

I took a spare CRT monitor over to the MIL's on Saturday to replace her dead LCD. She was undergoing computer withdrawal since it had failed last Tuesday. After getting it set up and verifying functionality, I brought her dead LCD back here. In keeping with my reputation as the computer whisperer, I have it back up and running. I'm going to keep it running on the bench system here for a few days just to make sure I really fixed the problem and then will journey back over to return it to MIL's computer desk. (I know she is having a hard time with the smaller screen and square pixels of the old CRT monitor she is stuck with right now versus the LCD with its 16:9 widescreen layout.)

It is amusing how dedicated both Mom and MIL are to their computers. Email, word procesing, and the web are an important part of their lives. Given that they both were drug, with at least some kicking and screaming, into the digital age decades ago, it is funny how important the computer is in their lives now. I often wonder what my grandfather would have thought of computers in day to day life if he had lived a bit longer. I still have a rudimentry computer game he built in the late '50s using relays and a vacuum tube for the computing power. I suspect he would have enjoyed the modern computer and its prescence in daily life immensely.

Well, time to get some meeting materials put together for tomorrow. Hope your Easter was good and this week is off to a good (not mopey) start.


I guess I'll go de-mope in the park with Molly. She's just about ready to rise from the "L left" mopes and check out the park for squirrels.