kissycat1000 is still alive, the phone call confirmed it. I'd sent her two texts yesterday and she hadn't answered either, rather uncharacteristically of her.I got home to find
olsw, my step-brother, was online. This is highly unusual. It turns out he's moved in to his Dad's place (actually the place his Dad uses as an office) and pretty much had his head sorted out, which is fantabulous news :) Also, he and his dad will be getting broadband soon which is also great news - we'll be able to stay in touch far more easily now *grin*. He called me up a little later on and we chatted. I must go and visit him soon! Aargh! Scheduling nightmares *grin*.I had a lovely chat with
duranorak last night, and a not so lovely one with uberredfraggle. Hope you're feeling better now.Also, I did lots of geekery and swapped motherboards around in my machine and managed to get Windows XP to 'repair' itself from the CD. Wonder of wonders; so that's saved me the hassle of rebuilding. Unfortunately my ace cooler won't fit on the new motherboard because of one capacitor. I'm very tempted to resolder it out of the way but it's risky. Ponderings.
Anyway, with a donation of a couple of heatsinks and an Athlon 1GHz from
jikatal, I have just about all the stuff to make T a new faster computer. There's some stuff to sort out concerning memory but I think I'll give it to her as an early christmas present, depending.And this morning, difficult but necessary conversations with people. *hugs* all.
Oh, and
rik, there's 3 quid on my desk in my room for that gorgeous curry you cooked last night. Nummy :)Now it appears I have to go and talk to my boss about the possibility that my role on this project is both winding down at present and also potentially unnecessary in the future. *sigh*.
Before I do that, the main reason I started writing this is because I wanted to write about the weekend and why it turned out to be important.
Before I do that, here is a quiz for your light relief:
Hrm. I think the weapon is accurate but I'm not sure I'm an extra from Pulp Fiction with the dialogue.
So, the weekend. Well,
kissycat1000 and I have been together for a good while now. She's not expected me to do anything as far as the kids go, but of course being around them a lot means I've slowly become involved in their lives to a greater and greater degree. This has caused me to stop and think about things a few times in the past, but nothing that shouldn't have happened as part of self-checking to make sure I understood what was going on.Well, we went camping, all in the same tent. It was an intense experience -
kissycat1000 said so herself: she was more like a friend to me throughout that time because we had no time to ourselves. There was one point where I was dog tired one morning and refused to get up to look after J, the youngest autistic one, while kissycat1000 went to the toilets. T usually looks after him pretty well. I'd had another night of about 4 hours sleep and wasn't really available for processing information fully first thing. kissycat1000 went off believing I'd be getting up but I stayed in bed. When she came back she was angry and the kids were getting bored, so she decided to take them out to amuse them, by herself.Unfortunately I wasn't awake enough to realise what was going on, but she wasn't gone long, and when she came back there was awkwardness for a good while afterwards. Neither of us really knew why, but I think we're beginning to understand that it was to do with the fact that we were getting through this holiday together. Never before had we acted so much like a family unit, and it brought new and shared responsibilities that I might have taken on before on an ad-hoc basis, but not quite like this.
Her taking the kids by herself made me feel like I wasn't up to the job of helping her, and from her perspective it was both necessary at the time and an effective way of showing me I was lacking.
Pain aside, we talked briefly and sorted things out, and shared some close moments later with the children both in times of strife and otherwise.
It was an important experience for me, which is why I wanted to write it up and remember it.
