So, here we are in Enid. Mom looks good, and she cooks good too! She fried up some chicken for us, and had some potato salad ready.

We got a late start, as I thought we probably would. I had a fairly rough night last night, getting to sleep around 01:00, then up at 03:00 or so, went back to sleep about 06:00 and finally got up at 10:00.

I got JD and Tyler up shortly, and the day started moving. JD had most of his packing done, and about the time we were ready to leave I noticed that I hadn't cut the vent-hole for the heat/AC; did that real quick, and put in a few more screws into the floor at Tyler's direction.

JD had a hard time packing everything into his truck, but we were finally rollong about 14:45. We thought that we'd see some damage south of Wichita from the tornado, but nothing was evident from the turnpike... I thought that there would be, I remember hearing that they'd closed I-35, but that must've been in OKCity, not Wichita. The boys'll see a lot, going through OKCity tomorrow. I called my cardiologist's office before we left to check on the Holter monitor, and the gal that I was talking to told me to watch out for the cows in the trees... her husband or brother or someone had driven up from Texas on Wednesday and reported the cows in the trees story.

Tyler and I rode in my truck down past Wichita, with him driving. We had a good talk (I thought...) and hopefully things will get better... I rode the rest of the way with JD. We made it in four hours. I like being a passenger... I'll have to drive back by myself, since Tyler is going on to Texas with JD. He'll be flying back in a few days or a week... not really definite about when.

It is always good to see mom, and she is getting along as good as ever... only she gets shorter every time I see her.

I plugged the modem in, and dialed up the ISP, and it worked just fine. However, when I got off-line, the phone was statiky enough to be unusable.... plus it kept the line open, so nobody could call in. Strange.

So I put the 56K winmodem in, and tried loading the drivers that I'd downloaded yesterday... but the disk that I'd brought was bad. And the E-machine WIN98 could not find a driver for it.

So I put in the 28K USR that I'd brought as a back-up... and it wanted the CDROM... which I'd left at home. I did have the supplemental 3.5 floppy, which was absolutely useless, of course. Trying to install it as a generic didn't work, either. It would put it on COM5 (which this e-machine doesn't know anything about, but it did it itself...) and then not be able to find it. When I would tell it where it was, it couldn't connect with it.

So I put the original back in, and downloaded a file that I hope will install the 56K winmodem; if that doesn't work, I'm just gonna have to train Mom to pull the modem plug out when she's not on-line...

right now, I'm downloading MSIE 5.0; I'll get that installed, then try the winmodem install again. But, while I'm still online, I'll upload this...

More tomorrow...