No picture for today. OK, I know how disappointed you are. Live with it.

I got up relatively early, considering how late I got to bed Saturday night. Karen pretty well tossed and turned all night, but I didn't sleep but for a half-hour after she got up.

She had one of her headaches; when I got up and dressed, I went out on the front deck to talk to her, and she told me that she had taken some nasal Stadol, hoping it would cure her headache. Instead, it knocked her on her ass. I got her to come back in and lay down while I made preparations to go to Enid.

Shortly after I was ready to go, I woke up JD and Lisa. Since we were traveling in separate vehicles, it didn't really matter too much if I left before them, but I did want to be sure that they were up before I left.

So I started down the turnpike about 10:30 or so. Passed a big ol' thunderhead just south of Emporia, but I just barely got rained on. The rest of the way down was clear.

Along the Kansas Turnpike, there are numerous deer xing signs. And there are other signs that one may pick up on by being observant: many of the deer don't make it all of the way across. There are skid marks every half-mile or so, making me wonder what these fools were braking for; sometimes the skid marks would be going into the median barrier and sometimes off of the road. Then I noticed that about every other skid mark was followed by a large red splotch on the pavement... those fool were running into deer, and avoiding running into deer sometimes, and avoiding hitting someone else who had run into deer at other times...

That turnpike is a virtual slaughterhouse!

More on the deer in the following entry (that will be Mondays entry... when I get it written...)

So... I got to Enid in the middle of the afternoon, and immediately unloaded and started disassembling mom's 386 and cannibalizing parts for the 486. I had taken the drive out of the 386, thinking of putting it into the 486, but I decided that going through another hour or two of loading WIN95 probably wasn't worth it, so I left the other drive in it. This was probably a mistake, but it took me a while to figger that out, as usual.

Mom is just a perky as ever, natch... she hasn't aged in the last fifteen years, I don't think... but she keeps coming up with, "Well, you know, I'm eighty..." on various and sundry occasions. I'm kinda like, " Give me a break, Mom... if you want to be treated like you're eighty, then act like you're eighty...."

The kids arrived shortly after I did. They had already been there once, and found that I wasn't there and Mom didn't answer the door (she was probably out in the back yard) so they went back out to get something to drink. They'd left about 20 minutes after I did, and passed me while I was at one of my four stops along the way. And they were probably speeding, too, which I never do. There's something peaceful (yeah, I know) about going the speed limit and not worrying about the cops... and watching the fools go by doing twenty MPH over... but they don't seem to be worried about the cops... but that's kinda what distinguishes the fools from the rest of us, huh...

So... major problems with the computer, surprise, surprise. It doesn't like the video card. At all. Hey, no problem-o, I brought along three extras!

None of which would satisfy that son-of-a-bitch. So I finally get it to work at 640X480, 16 colors. Well, OK, that'll do it for now. On to the modem.

The modem is a 14.4, a couple-three years old. I had it working on my old 486, and I had it working on the 386 at Mom's a year ago. But does it work now? No way! I spent an hour or so working on it, then we went out to meet my old buddie Jessie Roach and his wife Brenda and grand-daughter Kayleen at Puss's Red Barn Bar, Jess's usual hangout.

Brenda was recovering from cancer surgery and chemotherapy a year or so ago, when last I saw them. She told me that she had pancreatic carcinoma, but that they'd operated and done the chemo, then three months later operated again and she was clean, no more cancer left.

Uh-huh, said I silently nodding.

People don't recover from pancreatic CA to the best of my knowledge. It is a death sentence, usually occurring pretty swiftly... two to six weeks. I was pretty sure that I would never see Brenda again... but there she was. Surprised the hell out of me. Either she's that one in a thousand, or the diagnosis was incorrect, or (most likely) she got the primary wrong.

Either way, I was glad to see her.

Jess had not had time to get drunk yet when we got there, and as a result he was less interesting than he usually is. He is still a really good friend, but he does spend most of his non-working time soused. I drank a couple of cokes and the kids had a couple of beers, then I was ready to get home. I kept thinking about that fu**ing modem, for one thing...

There were storms about Sunday night. Big, bad storms... tornados, high straight wings, base-ball sized hail... all between Enid and Wichita. I continued messing with the computer until the power started flickering, then I shut it off and disconnected it... I was not going to press my luck... get the SOB set up and have it taken out by a power surge...

So JD and I switched off between going outside and watching the storm move in and watching the weather radar, which interrupted the X-files about every five minutes. Mom went to bed, and so did Lisa.

Pretty soon, about 00:30, we got the wind for a short while, and some hard rain for a few minutes. We had been brushed by the southern edge of the fiercest storm, which hit North Enid. It was soon past, and JD and I went to bed, knowing that there was another one following in about an hour. Mom was sleeping downstairs, and JD was supposed to sleep in the north room, I was in the double bed in the east room and Lisa was in the south room. I went in and lay down and was almost asleep when JD knocked on the door.

Lisa was having chest pain and trouble breathing... and tingling all over. I recognized it for a panic attack, but usually when you tell someone that, they completely disregard anything else that you say, so we decided that it was allergies due to the dust upstairs. We took her downstairs and got her an allergy pill and I had her re-breathe into a paper sack, then we left her alone for about five minutes while we went out and smoked. She was better when we came back in, but we changed the sleeping arrangements... she and JD went into the east room and I went into the north room. It took me another half-hour to get to sleep, and about that time the other storm hit... wind and hard rain. At first I thought it was hail, but it was just big raindrops hitting at fifty MPH...