## 251201: the big move!

  ## morning ...

Today's supposed to be when Mom gets moved to the Carroll center.  It's almost
noon and I haven't heard a peep from anyone about the logistics.  Last time,
I learned at the last minute that the transport service wanted payment
*in cash* on the spot when they met me, that was kind of weird but I guess
they consider themselves some kind of highflown specialist taxi.  Anyway,
here in late morning, the silence has been deafening.

I've amused myself by taking apart the failed UPS; there's a Batteries Plus
fairly nearby where I can get replacement bricks so I might as well fix it
here and recycle the old ones instead of hauling dead cells all the way home.
This takes two of the big 20Ah modules and is thus fairly heavy, but a label
inside indicated they were bought in 2012 or something, so "she daid".

And as I look around the house, the fact that *everything* will eventually
need to go out of it is ... overwhelming, even with Mom's relatively spartan
lifestyle.  She never liked a lot of *stuff* cluttering up a place, but guess
what, everyone has more than they think especially at her age.  Some of it
clearly needs to come home with me -- all the knitted items, most of the
art, all of her financial records... I think I called "Goodwill White Glove"
to launch some large furniture three years ago, but that was certainly not
an "empty the house" call.  But maybe I'm jumping the gun on this.  I didn't
get a lot of sleep last night, because the logistics of all this kept
whirling through my tiny brain.

  ## later ...

They finally called, though ... transport was set for about 3pm.  I tried to
go run a few errands beforehand, but ran into so many stupid delays I had to
cut that short and get back to the house.  Then, I threw my laptop into the
Big Briefcase with all of Mom's paperwork in it and headed over to the care
facility to basically camp out and wait for her arrival.

This was a gurney trip, as she's not mobile enough to even sit in a wheelchair.
The transport-service guy was led to the right room and I followed along, but
then got the heck out of the way until the staff could settle her in.  About
half an hour later I wandered down the hall; they were just finished getting
her set up.  I have to find out what the regimen of drugs is going to be here,
as pain control is the really important thing.  Largely the same as they
settled upon at the Hospice house, I imagine,  but I already see a bit of
miscommunication going on.

So she's on the campus once again, but much more "out of it" than 3 years ago,
That comes in waves, when they give her a dose of hydromorphone [market name:
Dilaudid] there's a bit of delay, and then she's zoinked again for several
hours and tries to murmur about seeing weird things on blank walls where
nothing is actually present.  That stuff is evidently quite a bit stronger
than plain ol' oxycodone or tramadol.  So if you're local and decide to go
visit, know that you could get a whole range of responsiveness.

I expect I'll be camping out in this room quite a bit, as things could change
any time, but also have to think about things on the home front.  They've got
a "guest" wifi, but it's all behind some kind of box called "meraki" which is
blocking a lot of stuff [some cisco product line].  I can get to google and
typical news sites, but not Discord or techno-fandom or anything that's not
considered, I dunno, "safely mainstream" ?? or whatever criteria someone
arbitrarily set in place.  I mean, they allow garbage like facebook and twitter
so really, wtf were they thinking by blocking other social sites??  I can
always tether if needed.  Oh, and the new phone having wi-fi calling is a
*godsend* -- cell service is still crap around here especially indoors, but
it comes right up on the wifi nets at both home and the care-center and
Just Works.