I don’t know if it was part of my tendency to pick low-lying fruit first, get it out of the way so I am freed to concentrate on the biggers, or if, either attributable to my supposed depression or independent of it or in spite of my lack of it or…, I felt overwhelmed, or because I’m a little AD(H)D or because I’m drug-weary and bone-fatigued still trying to catch up, or because I’m enstupided, confused or euphemistically foggled like a San Fran Bayor, but I’d spent hrs at the little table I’d stolen from my mother’s office & put both laptops (hers & his) ((in a mother-son kind of way)) on, putting & futzing around with clean-up utilities on my drive, & then attemptiong a foolhardy consol. of DLLs on the thing (which broke the back of more than one of my programs & caused me to then stay up ’til 3A one morning just going thru & starting up all my programs one after the other to see which ones still worked & which ones didn’t) and so forth without tackling the real major issues, the ones posing fundamental impediments to my return to productivity. I had plans to get there but progress was slow if it existed at all.

Then Shawn & Wade (sis & her hub) came over to bring me a grasshopper pie since Mom & I were late getting home from Mexico the night before on my mera birthday. Shawn apologized for not making it herself bacause her son knocked his two front teeth out earlier that morning.

How it came up I don’t remember, but Wade, an IT support contractor for Motorola, agreed to “take a look.” He got into the spirit of things—as he does, the gem—and by the time he was done his wife & my mom had gone back to his house for a wireless card and a coax cable, he’d gone back & returned w/ a coax splitter, we’d all had a couple slices of my ice cream pie (which I’d left out to soften, of course, seeing has how the pie tin was incompatible with the microwave, my usual method), he’d reset the dable modem & router, released & renewed Mom’s IP so that the laptop would recognize the connection, got her laptop going on his lent wireless card, showed me that I could connect my external drive through a small 1394 port on the other side of the laptop and buy a USB wireless connector saving me &99 diagnosis & $99/hr. to repair the PCMCIA slot, showed me how to connect directly to the router interface through its subnet mask address in a browser thus eliminating the need to install the Linksys drivers (which was triggering a BSOD on a page fault in HTTP.SYS), he told my Mom he had just the thing to salvage her data off the driver in her old and now crapping-out desktop (a USB drive case!) (a problem I told my mom I’d work on for her, not knowing how I’d interface with that old thing), and on top of all that, he connect the VCR my mom was unable to connect to her bedroom TV and got the cable working on it, too (which required going out to the box)!

Some fo that last stuff I neither had interest in nor responsibility for, other of it I would have solved sooner or later, and the rest I just didn’t know, but in sum his doing those few small jobs that night made a big difference for my mom & me. For me particularly it just felt like a big relief, a burden lifted off my shoulders, which highlights for me not only a beautiful, churchy kind of feel-good humanity but also how weakened or something I’ve become/made myself. Some of this stuff seemed big to me, bigger than it should have. I’d spent more miserably tedious time accomplishing less than he did in a cheerful night. Running the registery sweep repeatedly is subject to the law of diminishing returns. And I knew that.

Maybe there was some rationale for my approach (even if not completely) and I did/do tire easily, and this whole area is more Wade’s area (I promised to help him with PERL & Javascripting which he anticipates needing should he land the software license mgr job he’s applied for internally), but I still can’t help but pause to consider how & to what degree my mental (& emotional) state’s been affected by my shenanigans.