During August 30-September 3, I took a long weekend holiday to visit my mom and friends in Tennessee. Between the six-hour drive to get there and a couple hour-long drives to Chattanooga from my mom’s home, I managed to put over 900 miles on my Jeep.
Since my mom is trying to sell her place, I spent part of the weekend helping her sort and clean. My mom has enough books to start her own library.
On Thanksgiving Day I drove to Tennessee to spend the holiday with my mom. It was just the two of us, as Eugene and Heidi were visiting other family in another state. Mom made a great meal: vegetarian stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, lima beans, and homemade cranberry bread and apple pie. It was all very good.
The next day we went to the Northgate mall near Chattanooga to take advantage of the some of the Black Friday sales. I picked up some clothes and other items. I got a new modem for my mom’s beleaguered eMachine, since the previous modem was having hardware and/or driver problems that kept causing the whole machine to crash sooner or later after every boot, without exception. On a good day it might run for a number of hours before going down, but sometimes it wouldn’t last even one minute. If you’ve ever had a computer that would crash 30 seconds after booting, 10 times in a row, you can understand the frustration of this predicament. After installing the new U.S.Robotics modem it seemed to work fine. But I then had about a year’s worth of Microsoft patches (including the whole SP2) and virus updates to finish downloading and installing over a dial-up connection. (I wish I had bought her a Mac instead. Did I mention there are no viruses for the Mac?)