It is hard to express my relief that on waking up at about 1.00am in the morning, I tried the various TVs that we have only to find that all is now restored to normality. What actually caused the outage in the first place, I shall never really know or even care but fact that normal life as we have come to know it has been restored is so reassuring given the other tribulations that we have to endure. Of course there was a certain amount of reconfiguration of the TV equipment that had to take place in the wee small hours of the morning but this was a price I was more than willing to pay under the circumstances.
This section of the blog is a complete experiment. In the past few days, I have discovered that an old Bluetooth keyboard that I have used to interface with an iPad and which did not seem to work, could now be coerced into life. First of all, I discovered how to use a keyboard with my iPhone, as well as with my iPad, and basically using a technology app called Notes. This particular app is very well known in the Apple eco-structure and is very easy to use and has the great virtue that with a few very simple keystrokes, it is possible to send anybody a text wherever one wants and in particular to my email, which means that once the text is in an email sent to myself, I can access it from either of the two laptops that I have in the two main lounges of the house. Very much encouraged by this development, I wanted to see how much I paid for this technology in the first place. I do not think it was a great deal of money, but I was absolutely amazed to discover that I could actually buy a brand-new Bluetooth enabled little keyboard for the princely sum of less than £7.00 So to cut a long story short, I actually bought this little piece of kit (and, of course, it is made in China) and it is a sweet little thing in effect converting my iPad, and new keyboard, into the equivalent of a little laptop that I can actually utilise while sitting in my favourite armchair, whilst watching the TV on the one hand and talking to Meg on the other. This is quite liberating in many ways. However, what is even more extraordinary is the little button 'microphone' symbol and it allows one to dictate ones text. So far, in this particular section of the log, I had avoided using the keyboard all together and I am dictating the whole using the new technology. I need to look at the text and see what terrible errors may or may not have been committed, but the fact that I can sit down and actually say what I want to say and it gets converted into text almost immediately is considerably liberating. I am actually quite excited as, in the past, you could pay an absolute fortune for this kind of technology. I seem to remember that there was an application in the IBM PC days called Dragon software and you paid hundreds of pounds for it, but this now seems available to almost anybody who wants it as an incredibly cheap price and we will have to see how it works. All that I can say is so far so good at this will conclude this particular section.
This morning starts off in a somewhat unusual way. Meg seems to have slept relatively well given the shenanigans of last night's drama with our TV reception. But as I was getting dressed after my shower, the doorbell rang and one of the carers had turned up 20 minutes early. So she made a start getting Meg washed and dressed and I was going to act as the second carer (necessary when it comes to turning a prostate body - one to hold whilst the other washes) But then the second carer turned up on time and not late as predicted. The carers normally wear a thin disposable apron before commencing their washing duties but I was not wearing one. But in the washing process, I got wet through and just having put on a clean set of clothes had to discard them all and start to get dressed all over again. We breakfasted on porridge and toast and then made our way down the hill to meet up with our friends as we generally do each Saturday. It really was the most delightful day starting at about 10.30 but then the weather clouded over and we have had an increasingly gloomy afternoon. We had a jolly time with the five of us and although sometimes Meg is a bit sleepy, she was wide awake whilst she had her tea and Danish pastry. Then it was a case of ensuring we got back up the hill before the carers' late morning call, after which I threw together some bits and pieces to make quite a tasty Saturday meal. After lunch, I navigate up through the channels and stopped at one showing past episodes of 'Rising Damp' which still remains reasonably amusing despite the act that it was shown in the 1970's and needs to broadcast a disclaimer to disavow the racist and inappropriate humour which was not then inconsistent with the standards of the time. Normally, Meg can sit in her wheelchair securely enough to await the arrivals of the carers in the late afternoon. But this afternoon, perhaps as a consequence of losing all upper body strength, Meg was practically sliding out of her chair (a tendency to which she is wont). So I had to take some emergency remedial action and just about got Meg up in her hoist which is normally a two-handed job and then got her located reasonably safely in the armchair which we have in our main lounge which has ensured has quite a pronounced backward sloping tilt to it so that Meg can be relatively secure within it. I have put together some materials which I happened to have to hand to make a kind of bolster arrangements which I am going to try out on the armchair in the Music Lounge tomorrow. If I am fairly successful, then hopefully the slipping incident to which Meg may be subject may be averted but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say.
© Mike Hart [2024]