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The next day, Sophrani's parents arrived earlier than expected. I spent the morning before they arrived playing with my devices and doing a little bit of writing on my Surface.
The parents arrived early enough that Sophrani was still busy getting ready, so I spoke with them for a while as she prepped. Her mother wore a red-and-white scarf from a German football (aka soccer) team; she'd asked Sophrani to get her this scarf from Germany when Sophrani was there decades ago for school, and takes great joy from it.
We went to the Cheesecake Factory for lunch. Because Envoy and his SUV wasn't there, we tried to pile the five of us into Kage's antique Jaguar sedan for the trip. Sophrani's dad said he didn't care whether he sat behind Kage (no leg room because Kage is tall) or the middle seat. I sat behind Kage and Sophrani's dad struggled to fold up into the middle seat. He managed to cram into it and her mom sort of squeezed in next to him but this looked very perilous. "I'll take my mom's car," I said.
"I'll ride with Rowyn!" Sophrani seconded. "I can guide her if we lose you. Mom can sit in the front seat of the Jag and Dad can sit behind her." We piled out again.
I had kind of a terrible time getting out of their driveway: they have a very long, steep driveway, and while it has ample space when I'm driving up it, it is much too narrow for me to back down without a backup cam. And my mom's car doesn't have a backup cam. The top is more than three cars wide but I struggled to turn around in it with Sophrani's parents car up there. (Also, I always have this problem, tbh.) Eventually I managed, though.
Even though it was a Monday afternoon, the Cheesecake Factory was crowded. They told us it was a 30-minute wait for a table, but the actual wait was closer to an hour. We spent some time browsing the It'Sugar nearby. When we returned to the restaurant for the remainder of the wait, the noise around the lobby was so great that I went outside to pace instead. My feet do better with pacing than standing. Kage suggested I try shoe inserts to help with my feet hurting if I stand for long, but I haven't gotten around to it.
Fortunately, the booth area was much quieter and we could talk through the meal. Sophrani told me about her bsky account, which she mostly uses to chat with other quillers (quilling is a papercraft) and showed me some photos of her quilling. Ooh, pretty.
Sophrani had a small gift card for Cheesecake Factory and gave it to Kage so he could use it to pay for part of the meal. He went to the restroom and was still away when the check arrived. I put my credit card on it.
Sophrani looked at me. "You got dinner last night. And Kage's got the gift card."
"And I won't fight Kage over it if he comes back before the waiter gets the check. But he has to at least make an effort. Some effort. He's not even here."
Fortunately for Kage, the waiter was distracted by another table and a problem with a drawer, so the check was still on the table when he returned. I let him replace my card with his (and the gift card).
After lunch, I drove Sophrani back to her place. I tried Envoy's trick of turning my car around in a little side drive off the main driveway and then backing up. I got about ten feet up and decided this was good enough and we could walk up to the door.
I stayed a little bit longer to visit, then went back to my parents' home and spent the evening with them. Most of the time I spent at my parents' home was either watching murder mysteries on TV with my father in the living room, chatting with my mother in her office, or sitting with my mother in her office while we used our respective computers.
I pretty much don't watch videos at home. I'll watch very short clips (5 minutes or less) if they're linked to from social media, and I'll watch Last Week Tonight. That's about all I've watched at home since Lut passed away. When I'm visiting my parents, I watch so much video, though. Most available recliners are in the living room, where my father watches TV unless he's playing poker. I thought the only other recliner was the one my mother uses, in her office, but it turns out there's a recliner in a corner in my father's office. I may try using it on my next trip, although I suspect the sound of the TV will be too loud in the office to make it a good spot to sit in peace. When I move there, I'll bring my reclining loveseat and have the movers install it in the big empty second floor room, with my computer, so it'll be comfortable to stay up there and it's reasonably quiet. I worry that I'll spend a lot of time hiding on the second floor when I'm living there, just because I really do not enjoy the amount of TV noise generally going on in the house. My mother watches much less than my father, but she still enjoys videos and spends several hours a day watching them.
I watch a lot of videos while visiting my friends, too, but their tastes are much more similar to mine and also I'm not staying with them for several days at a time, much less living with them.
My mother and I ordered groceries on Monday evening for delivery on Tuesday morning. This included ingredients for lasagna and sugar cookies, both of which I would make.
I also tried to set up the tablet pen with the Surface. It didn't come with sync instructions, so I web-searched for generic ones. After some fiddling, I eventually got the tablet pen to light (as generic web instructions said it should) while I held down the eraser-button, but my Surface didn't recognize it no matter what I did.
At this point, it was too late to order a tablet pen that would arrive during my visit. I gave up on the business.
December 24
I made lasagna for Christmas Eve. As with all my previous efforts to make or bake something, this involved an extra trip to the store: of all things, I had forgotten to order lasagna noodles. I picked up a few extra things while I was there, including a disposable lasagna pan so I wouldn't have to worry about overflowing or using two pans or cleaning the pans afterwards.
I made a huge quantity of lasagna because making half a lasagna recipe has never occurred to me I guess. Over the course of the next four days, I ate most of it, with help from my parents. My father had a good chunk of it and my mother had a few pieces. I ate the last piece on the 28th and was surprised that we got through it.
I decided to try fingerpainting on my tablet to see if I could make Apothecaria entries for December 27 and 28 that way. The last time I tried tablet fingerpainting with ArtRage, it had sort of worked, in that I could draw, but not really because if I picked up my finger and then put it down again, the program drew a straight line between the two points instead of doing nothing while I wasn't touching it.
This time, it worked the way I expected intuitively: it drew while I was touching the screen, centered on the center of the pad of my finger, and didn't draw when I wasn't touching it, and of course wasn't sensitive to any changes in pressure because the tablet screen doesn't register pressure -- it's the stylus that might be able to, and it has to report that to the device.
The fingerpainting experience was adequate, so I illustrated an Apothecaria on Christmas Eve.
December 25
I baked sugar cookies: a double batch because in the first batch I used half a cup of butter instead of a cup by mistake. (I do not know how or why this happened. It was a weird mistake given how often I've made this recipe.)
My mother has one extremely heavy, thick baking sheet. Cookies on this baked very slowly, I guess because the sheet was too thick to heat quickly and kept the cookies cool longer? It was weird. The cookies came out in a variety from "squishy and dense" to "crisp" to "normal". I made far too much frosting and then for reasons unclear to me put it in the fridge instead of pitching it because what was I gonna do with an extra two cups of frosting? Idk.
Cookies are my one Christmas tradition: I mail out cookies every year to my family and a few friends. Sophrani always gets a box but I delivered hers in person on the 22nd. My parents got fresh-from-the-oven ones, since I was there in person.
Christmas was otherwise quiet: just watching TV and occasionally chatting. I started the Apothecaria illustration for Saturday's entry.
December 26
My mother wanted me to replace the batteries in the smoke detector, so I did that today. I wrote about this adventure in my December review post, so I won't describe it again here. I got to pair the trip to get AA batteries with the trip to get my mother's near-daily McDonald's quarter-pounder fix. She had done without on Christmas Eve and Christmas and could bear it no longer.
I finished the Saturday Apothecaria entry on this day.
December 27
I visited Sophrani/Kage/Envoy again, getting in a little earlier in the afternoon and leaving around 11:00PM. I picked up McDonald's for my mom before I left, and she let me take my dad's car (it's the newer one that she usually drives) to see my friends. Since Dad's car has a backup cam, I was able to use the "turn around in the side drive and back up" strategy successfully this time. Huzzah!
We did our usual mix of socializing and watching videos. We watched the rest of the Secret Level episodes, with an exception or two that Kage panned. For dinner, we went to a small fancy restaurant. After dinner, we saw watched a bunch of "Love, Death & Robots" episodes, sampling the ones Kage or Envoy had found particularly interesting.
December 28
I spent my last day in the area with my parents -- once again, my flight left late.
One day when I was there -- perhaps the 26th or the 28th -- my father left to play poker and I sat in the living room to play with my computer. My mother came in to keep me company, but wanted to watch TV. Both my parents have TVs set up only for streaming services, because their cable company stopped supporting their Tivo and my brother was like "if they have to figure out a new system for TV anyway, it might as well be streaming which is cheaper and offers more shows." But for whatever reason, my father and my mother's TVs aren't set up to stream in the same way. My mother's TV has you browse different streaming services: "this section is for PBS, this section is for Peacock, this is for Netflix, etc." My father's TV has you browse by category, wandering through mysteries, rom-coms, popular films, etc. When you find a show you want, it pops up what services you can use to watch it. I hate this, because there's no "only show me what's available on services I'm already paying for" option.
I actually hate the entire "watch streaming on a TV" experience because using a TV remote to browse or enter a show name is awful. But since I don't watch videos when left to my own devices, I didn't notice this until I was trying to help my parents with their devices. Lut and I always watched streaming videos on our computers. Technically I own a TV, but only because I've never bothered to throw it away. It hasn't been turned on since 2008 and doesn't work because it doesn't use the current standard and we didn't bother to get the then-free adapter to let it work because why would we.
Anyway, my mother spent a good forty minutes wandering through shows on my father's TV, trying to find something that (a) she wanted to watch and (b) she didn't have to set up an additional streaming service for. Like, even if they weren't already subscribed to 5+ different streaming services and didn't want another one, it's not clear how you'd actually use the TV to buy anything. Probably you'd have to buy it on a computer and then somehow convince the TV that you'd bought it. It would probably involve logging into the account that only my brother has the password for and that he will not share with anyone else, including my parents who actually use the account. There's at least one streaming service that they subscribe to that isn't set up on my father's TV as it is. Nothing about the "streaming to a TV set" experience is intuitive.
My mother never succeeded at her "find something to watch on Dad's TV" quest, but she said she was enjoying the process, so good enough. I got her to chat for a bit about other things, like moving one bookcase from her office and into the living room, so that we could put a second recliner in her office. I advocated for this because I'd spend more time with her if there was a recliner for me to sit on instead of an ancient office chair.
Late in the afternoon of the 28th, while I was sitting in the ancient office chair, the metal arm on it broke. It didn't even break at a joint: the metal itself snapped. The design of the office chair is such that the whole back lists to one side and will probably break the other arm. Fortunately, the only person who ever sits in it is me; my mother just uses it to pile clothes on when I'm not there. When my oldest brother visits, he uses the seat on her walker if he needs to sit with her for a bit.
Two or three hours before my flight was supposed to leave, I got a text from Southwest that it was delayed by an hour. I checked the website, and the new landing time for my first flight was 5 minutes after the connecting flight took off. This seemed to me to be A Problem.
It did not appear to be A Problem to Southwest's website, which offered no particular insight on what I was supposed to do after landing. With a midday flight, this sort of thing generally means a few hours of delay while they put you on the next flight, but with a late-evening flight, the odds of being stuck overnight at an airport go way up.
Eventually, I web-searched to find Southwest's phone number (the mobile website wouldn't show it to me) and called them. Wendy, a lovely customer service rep at Southwest, agreed with me that, yes, landing 5 minutes after the connecting flight leaves is suboptimal. She found an alternate route that left half an hour later but the layover was on the way to my destination instead of out of the way, so it's scheduled arrival was only ~10 minutes later. Perfect!
She tried to schedule me on it, and the computer system gave her a cryptic error message.
Wendy: "I'm sorry, I have to put you on hold while I get someone to sort this out."
Me: "oh no customer service needs to call customer service"
Wendy: "I know right???"
It turned out Southwest's system had given her a hard time because I'd already checked in on the previous route. They got it straightened out.
Plane travel went smoothly from there. I read more of Time-Crossed Engineer on the flight, and also did a bit of writing on The Secret Dragon. My connecting flight pushed back from the gate a little early, even, so that we landed at about the time my original flight was supposed to land.
Getting home from the airport was more troublesome. First, since I'd neglected to get the letter and number of the stop nearest where I'd parked, I had to find my car. I described the spot to the shuttle driver: "I entered lot A, turned left after a few rows, drove through a gap in a fence that separated two lots, and parked near row 14, not far from the fence."
Passenger: "That sounds like you entered lot C. I think that's near the E7 stop?"
Driver: *dubious* "There's a number you can call for a service that'll help you find your car, I'll give it to you before you get off."
Shuttle: *drives through a gap in fence separating two lots, passes sign for row 14*
Me: "Oh, there it is."
Driver: "Are you sure? You want off at the next stop?"
Me: "Yes, I can literally see my car, it's fine."
As I drove home from the airport, a thick blanket of fog enveloped the area, and escaping from economy parking was particularly hellish as I had to rely on "exit this way" signs to navigate, and some of them were literally set up to guide cars in a giant circle. Four consecutive signs with "Exit" and a right arrow icon. I do not know what they were thinking. But between night and fog I couldn't actually see where the exit was. I ended up following another car and then both of us got lucky and escaped.
My car has an automatic setting for headlights, that turns both headlights and brights on and off as appropriate. Usually I leave it on this setting because it works well and I don't have to think about it. For this drive, I switched it to manual "headlights only, no brights" because the fog was so thick that the brights just reflected off the fog and made my night vision worse instead of increasing illumination. I had Google Maps navigate me to home because I wasn't sure I'd see road signs in time. It was excrutiating.
Between searching for the parking lot exit and the fog, I got in around 1AM. Eliyahu was awake and waiting for me, so we hugged and I talked about the awful drive home and sat at my computer to decompress. I stayed up another hour or so, playing Time Princess and looking at social media and whatnot. Eventually, I felt relaxed enough to sleep.
