Sob

So I'm on dial up. There should be a law against being on dial up. It is so slow it is almost criminal. I mean it.

Obviously I'm NOT handling it well at all.

The trouble with being your own boss is basically you are your own IT department (as well as your own HR department, accounting department, etc). I get nominal support from the company I do all my work for but it really is nominal (eh, we really don't support home computers and a bunch of suggestions of stuff I laready tried!). For being entirely self taught in the IT sector, I'd say I've done really well. I know now the problem is with the computer. The DSL modem is working fine, the router is working find, the computer thinks it is hooked up to the DSL but web pages won't load and I can't check email. So it is a computer problem, not a service provider problem and not a DSL modem problem and not a router problem. And now I'm stuck.

WAH! Does anyone feel sorry for me?

In other news, my grandmother is dying. She has passed from passively dying to actively dying. Have you ever heard of an 87 year old anorexic? I hadn't but that seems to be what we've got. There's a huge disconnect between eating and living and unfortunately it seems to be too late. She had a ocmplete clean bill of health back in February (with every test in the book) and now has a grapefruit sized mass in her abdomen - they don't know if it is colon cancer or ovary cancer but they can't do anything because she only weighs 75 lbs. She's always been tiny but this is way too small to fight anything so they've sent her home from the hospital with a full time hopice nurse.

It is such a shame. Sure she is 87 but two years ago she could have easily passed for 70, she looked that good. My grandfather's last words to my dad and his sister were "make sure your mother eats" but unfortunately they had NO idea what he actually meant. She's slowly starved herself for the past two years but no on quite caught on until recently. And now she tells my dad (her son) she doesn't want to die. No one wants her to but I think it is too late.

This weekend we are going to go see her. We are going to drive to husband in Santa Barbara on Friday night and then on Sat we'll all drive to LA to see her. I'm not good at good byes and this is going to suck big time. But we need to do it, Austin needs to measure himself against her (it has always been a milestone when a grandchild passed grandma and the first words out of Austin's mouth when I told him my grandma was dying was that she couldn't possibly be dying because he just knew he had passed her in height and he had to show her). Then she has to hang on until my brother can get to her. He is in the process of driving to the bay area from Detriot (he's moving here). Grandma hasn't seen his girls (7 and 9) since they were babies. So she's got to see those two great grandkids and then I guess she can go.