More Blood, Sweat and Tears

I had to call the doctor’s office today to figure out when my upcoming appointment is. The appointment card said Tuesday the 4th or 9th depending upon how one deciphers the handwriting. Since the 4th is a Wednesday and the 9th is a Monday nothing short of a phone call would settle the issue. It turns out it is on Wednesday the 4th.

Since the appointment is 2 days away I began the day by going to get some blood drawn for my blood work.

Back on the home front I bought a new wireless router that will hopefully have a wider range than our current one. I’d like to be able to use my laptop in our bedroom. Right now the coverage is spotty back there for me. Penny’s computer works fine in the bedroom.

The problem is (this is the tears part) I’m having a bear of a time setting it up. The router is supposed to have a setup wizard on the CD but the .exe file that is the wizard is not on the CD. The alternate setup procedure was cumbersome but I finally reached the point where I had the router working and connected to the internet—but only for our desktop. After some more time and effort I got my laptop to see the router but I couldn’t get past the WEP security. I couldn’t get Penny’s computer to see it at all. So I put the old router back on and will step away from it for a while. This was the 2nd computer issue we had this week. Norton antivirus graciously upgraded my 2006 version of the software to 2008. In the process it introduced a couple of error conditions that made the computer unusable. I used their customer support but they couldn’t fix it. For a while today my computer was being controlled remotely from India. I finally recovered my computer with Norton Ghost (a program I highly recommend) to the way it was on May 4th and left the antivirs 2006 program in place. Between the 2 issues I have spent hours in front of the computer and not actually solved the problems.

The sweat part of the day was yard work edging the lawn where it had crawled about a foot out over the driveway. I did this work at a leisurely pace, resting the thumbs often. The thumbs still hurt but the pain is much reduced. Time will tell whether this treatment helps in the long term. I did some research and if my problem is arthritis the prognosis is bad—if it’s tendonitis it might get better.

Then there are the raccoons. I’ve set up the trap so that I can spring it with our sliding door. Since I’ve consistently watched the little boogers feasting out there, I thought I might have a chance to spring the trap manually. Again, no fear of hurting a cat. It means I have to be there, however. Last night I watched a raccoon go into the trap just deeply enough to reach some food. If I wasn’t concerned about catching the critter’s tail in the slamming door (and probably breaking it) I could have caught him last night. He just wouldn’t go in enough . Finally he scared himself and ran off. That was 9:30. I woke up at 2:30 and checked the trap and there was a coon trying to get into my cat feeder. It didn’t even try the trap. This may have been a different raccoon than the one I saw earlier. In the morning all the food in the trap was eaten—so I missed him going inside.

Tonight I’ve made it so he gets no food until he goes deep enough in the cage. I also set up a baby monitor to alert me when some noise occurs out there. It’s almost 9:30 and we’ve had no action