Honoring her best self in all we do

I made a lot of phone calls for the cause, asking neighbors to visit and support Dad while I'm away.  Talked to the hospice nurse about managing Mom's episodes if needed.  Left message for the James about the episode, verified with Autumn that Mom's dose of Seroquel has been reduced, and it has.  Left message for the church to let them know that Mom's OK now.

All of this while my cell phone coverage blinked on and off, went from "No Service" to "Searching" to one bar and back to "No Service" all day long.  I was not getting calls ringing in, I'd just get a notice, eventually, that I had a voice mail message.  I assumed it was because of being in this area, since I'd had trouble the last time I was here.  I could only get reliable service on Chris's deck, then, in a certain position if I didn't touch or move the phone too much. 

I finally looked up Chris's address on the AT&T coverage map and found it should be "good" coverage here.  So I called tech support, was on the phone for an hour with them, and may have gotten it resolved.  You can imagine I was pretty steamed.  I explained to them that I'm in a particular need of reliable service at present and I was not happy.  At Dad's, I could walk around his woods and back fields of his dirt-road farm and get perfect service.  It just didn't make sense.  I'd also received a notice that I was $100 over on my usage this month.  I'd already increased my plan once this month.  They were slow, but great at finding the problems.  One was that my cell is 3G and there is only one 3G tower out of six in the area - the others are all 2G.  So I had to turn 3G off.  It was also constantly looking for my "personal hot spot" (sounds kinda sexy, don't it?) and I don't have that service, so we had to turn that off.  And then they found that my phone was not configured correctly on their computers for use in this area(?), so they fixed that.  It will take 24 hours to get through their system and get corrected, and in the meantime, I still don't have service.  They reversed the $100+ charge and refunded my entire month of service, to make it up to me, though.  We'll see how tomorrow goes. 

In the meantime I missed calls from lots of people, the Pastor, my friend Page, and the interviewer on the LA job.  I didn't even get the voice mail notices that they'd called until this evening.  I'll just have to apologize and try to catch up with everyone tomorrow.

Chris's land line was not a good option because they've already spent too much on phone service recently, and so had I.  I didn't want to add to their bill or have to pay them for its use.  I've already spent way too much money on this endeavor, with the travel costs, extra warmer clothes, etc.  The whole situation really bit and had me boiling for a while. 

But, I had a fabulous massage from Chris's therapist and friend here, and got some extraordinary love from Chris's Papillon Sammy.  When I got off the phone with AT&T he jumped up on the couch with me and started licking and loving on me really nicely, then cuddled up and napped with me.  Benji wasn't sure what to make of it, came and checked it out, then went back to lay in Sammy's bed, which he has sorta rudely taken over and loves.  Sammy has been nice about it, after an initial tussle.  Benji is much more alpha than Sammy and Sam has had to escape Ben's advances.  He actually hid under the couch this evening to get away from Ben's pestering, teasing and playing.  What a sweetie.  It helped my spirits to have his little pap lovins.

Dad is blue today.  Without me there he's feeling the emptiness.  Mother is sleepy and tired and not talking much, still.  He's worried about her a lot, now.  Tomorrow is the radiologist appointment, another worry.

As I said to the Pastor's helper, we are finding our way through this.  Mom has been a great example to follow and we're trying to remember to honor her best self in all we do.