A difficult week

What with Nikcy’s health and my work, it has been a difficult week. It has however, ended better than it began, and not just because the AB’s stuffed the French in Cardiff, but that helped.

Nicky was still really suffering with her upper respiratory tract infection at the beginning of the week. The coughing and resultant vomiting were meaning that she was getting little sleep, and the laxative effect of the antibiotics made sure she was getting even less sleep. She was back at the Doctors on Tuesday, having decided to make early use of a blood test form which he had given her awhile ago because she just felt so unwell. On getting the results he informed her that she has diabetes. We think she is actually pre-diabetic as the Doc didn’t put her on any medication, and has given her three months to “get her act together”. He doesn’t think there is much wrong with her diet though asked her to cut out cakes, biscuits, crumpets and other high-sugar foods. His main concern is her lack of cardiovascular excise, which has largely come about since moving to BHB library. She used to have a good 35 minute walk to New Lynn most mornings when she worked there. This news, as you can imagine, was a bit of a shock, and has taken awhile to process and start to come to terms with. Nicky has finished the week not 100%, but feeling much more normal, much more positive, and is starting to put in place a more regular exercise routine.

I have been dealing with three jobs, all of which have demanded a great deal of non-billable time. The Macs which I upgraded last weekend went OK, until a couple hours before I had to return them on Monday morning. I had recommended doing the upgrade to give the customer a more reliable backup of his email - a crucial element of his business - and at 6.30am Monday morning it stopped working. I set up a work round but have not yet got to the crux of the issue. The customer is now away for a week so I will pick this up again later. Another customer called me and the Mac looked like it had a failing drive, but it wasn’t failing in quite the normal way. However, I brought it back home and another piece of software indicated a media failure, so I went and purchased a new drive and fitted it. It wouldn’t format. After many hours of testing and reading on the web I decided we had a drive cable failure, something which I can’t fix, but I know some men who can. This they did, and reported that the drive cable had only partially failed, which is why I was seeing the “unusual for me” behaviour. In the past 18 years when I have encountered a drive cable failure, it has been a complete failure so much more obvious. Anyway, I finally got it sorted and returned to the customer and earned some money. The third job was an insurance claim, which ended up with me replacing the Mac for the customer. This required quite a bit of admin on my part, especially as in the 18 hours between the insurance company accepting the claim and me going to order the new machine, Apple put the price up by $300! Again, I got it sorted in the end, but I feel I have had a very busy week but with little income to show for it. Never mind.

The other aspect of our week which has been odd has been the lack of laundry and ironing. On Monday Nicky dyed a shirt, and during the long hots wash we stopped the machine as soap suds were working their way across the laundry. A very nice man and came on Wednesday and will be brining the machine back tomorrow, complete with new shock absorbers. As a result the washing line has had a rest all week.

With Nicky starting to feel better but still consuming enough Gee’s Linctus to stop her driving, I took her over to Stella’s yesterday morning for Scrabble with her and Steve. I stayed and participated in the conversation, but not the game (perish the thought!!!). Nicky had a good afternoon with BHB Quilters and the tellybox occupied our evening.

We were up early-ish this morning (Nicky absenting herself for a prison visit due to the Gee’s Linctus again and not feeling quite well enough to deal with the visit), to watch the rugby. It went very well with a good bowl of hot porridge. Nicky went off to church at half time, and this afternoon we have been for a walk on a new pathway. It is one of the early sections to open of the Whau Pathway which will be a 14km route from Olympic Park to Te Atatu when completed in about 5 years time. We had showers (jacket on) sunshine (jacket off) and earring hunting (successful) as well as a couple of good conversations. This evening will be lots of tellyboxing as our current crop of drama series come to a close, which is why I am and doing this now. I may be staying up later to hopefully watch the Irish thrash the Argies!!!

Take care, Rick