Today

Friday was a strange day.

It started as normal. Friday is my 'day off', that is I do not work out on Friday. I usually try to get a little extra time in bed and often manage to stay there until 5.0 a.m. This Friday I got up shortly after 5.00 and as I headed to my office, I noticed that my computer screen was displaying a blue screen instead of the usual cycle of photographs. A closer look confirmed that the computer was sick. It had apparently attempted to heal itself but had failed and was displaying a miserable message: "Automatic Repair Couldn’t Repair Your PC"

I tried a few things to see if I could get it working. No luck, so I decided to wait for Larry to get up and see if he could figure it out. 

We had an appointment to get our second booster / fourth COVID vaccination at 10.00 so the computer would have to wait till we returned from that. It didn't take long, But, after the shots Larry had a few things he needed to do so it was midday before we got home. Under Larry's supervision—he is better with hardware than I am—I tried a number of things to try to fix the problem. I had my laptop to google the various error messages. Tried running chkdsk, that failed due to read only issues. Luckily, I am very comfortable with the command line and was able to access that. Nothing Google suggested worked.

We do run a background process which backs up our computers and saves the image to our server, so we tried restoring one of these. Still no luck. Despite the fact that I had a double backup of my important files, my writing, on OneDrive and on a USB flash drive, still I was getting more and more stressed by the frustrating failure to solve the issue. 

When I noticed that my shoulder was starting to ache, I removed myself from the office and sat with a heating pad on my shoulder for a while. No, this was not the booster causing the pain, it was that same shoulder that necessitated two months of Physical Therapy. Two weeks previously I had gone back to the PT and she discovered that the large bicep had once again popped out of its groove. Some expert manipulation had forced it back into the groove, and two visits a week for 4 weeks would be required to strengthen the muscles and retrain me to use my back muscles to support any shoulder movement. I certainly didn't want to impact the progress so far. I was aware that stress causes me to tense up my shoulders in a way that might cause more damage. The heat helped and I forced myself to relax and pay attention to my shoulder.

We had planned to meet with my stepson and his wife for dinner. I was looking forward to a dine out experience. Something that was a regular occurrence before COVID was now extremely rare. That fell through but we decided to go out to eat anyway. We have a restaurant just over a mile from our home and it is reasonably good. That was where we went. 

When we returned, as we pulled through the gates into our community, I looked at the familiar street, lined with town houses to our left, against the backdrop of the lake behind them, and a steep incline to our right with the backs of small row cottages that once had a clear open view of the lake and now looked down on the town houses that were built across their view. The slope is scattered with small Spanish Oak trees clinging precariously to the sloping rock face—it seems that all of Texas is solid rock. The trees are interspersed with small rock walls, I presume to stop the cottages from sliding down the rocky slope into the roadway. Home again, I thought to myself, with a feeling of nostalgia. 

In that moment, I realized that there might come a day when that roadway in front of me would become a memory. Something I would look back on with that feeling of nostalgia I just experienced. This was exactly the here and now that I had promised myself I would soak in and enjoy as it happened, not relegating it to be remembered fondly sometime in the future, with a knowledge that I had not enjoyed it enough at the time. 

I need to keep working on living in the moment. I even blogged about it here. Today is the yesterday I will be nostalgic about tomorrow

Larry is still working on the computer and I am using my laptop while that is happening. We are fully boosted. And my shoulder is improving. Life is good.