Update
Thanks for the sympathies, everybody.
Wednesday night, Mom said that she'd had it and that this was the last time. We dug out an old saw bit and finished all the drilling needed for our deadbolt on the back door. She said she'd be cutting off his cell phone (yes, she's still got him on her plan) immediately. About that time the sheriff's deputy came over. Nice young lady, very sympathetic and conversational. Told us there wasn't much they could do. After she left, we found out that the deadbolt guide had, despite all the instructions that came with both the lock and the guide itself, been off by nearly 1/4 inch in telling us where to place the hole for housing the lock mechanism. The deadbolt is unusable, in fact we can't even put the whole thing in. I hope we can find a replacement that fits our new holes in the door, being about 3/8 of an inch longer than the standard size. If not, we'll probably have to replace the whole door.
For all Mom's seeming resolve that night, she wasn't holding up on her end. Every day I asked her if she was going to turn off his cell phone like she promised. "Not today, I'm tired." Friday night she was all to eager to let Britain come over and have some money. She also revealed that, despite her swearing up and down the previous nights, she was going to allow Britain's phone to remain active "until Tuesday or Wednesday of next week," allegedly so that he could give a recruiter for the National Guard a number to call. I lost my temper then and basically screamed "NO!" at her without hardly meaning to. I said that Britain wouldn't be coming over here, and he wouldn't be getting any money. As a compromise, I said that I'd go over to his apartment and take him grocery shopping (to make sure he was using it to buy food and not drugs). I told her to cut off his phone while I was gone. She didn't. I told her that dealing with her was like trying to tell an alcoholic that they can't just have "one more drink," reminded her that her enabling is only encouraging him and it's just as big of a problem for her as his drug habit is for him. She was pretty mad the rest of the night and we didn't speak. I have reason to think she's taking some of her anger and frustration about this situation out on me, behind my back.
I'm not going to allow her to keep backsliding, make excuses for and be duped by that manipulative liar. I'm not going to let him keep taking from us and wearing us down. I'm trying desperately to think of some way to make this clear to her without laying on a full-fledged (and rest assured, vicious) guilt trip, or stripping her of all seeming authority in the matter. Maybe that last one will have to go, though. There are bigger things at stake than her ego, like the safety of this family.
[ The following will have hyperlinks for educational purposes. And because I'm bored. ]
In other news, I finally managed to get some of my Ubuntu Live CDs working yesterday and installed Feisty Fawn on the laptop. Shortly thereafter, in trying to fix a sound problem (I couldn't hear any!) via a guide posted on the official Ubuntu Forums, I managed (through no actual doing of my own) to purge the Gnome display manager and the Ubuntu Desktop Environment, leaving me with no graphical user interface. I couldn't reinstall them totally because of missing dependencies, so they still don't work and now my Linux install is verborken. Thanks a ton, Ubuntu Forum. :\
I should point out that Ubuntu still, technically, WORKS, just in a text-only mode that's practically unusable to me as a newbie. Gotta admit, that -is- pretty durable. I don't know what would happen if I had baleeted Windows Explorer and tried to use XP.
I'm going to repartition and selectively reformat the drive. The installation was more space-constrained than I would have liked. I apparently have a 100G hard drive, with 55G devoted to a Windows C:\ partition and 35G going to some unknown but mostly empty D:\ partition, plus 10G for the Asus recovery stuff. When Ubuntu installed the first time, it repartitioned the Windows sector and split the 55G between XP and Ubuntu, giving me very little relative space for either one.
I think I'm going to use GNU Parted to erase the broken Ubuntu partition, stretch Windows out a bit, shrink the mysterious 35G section to something more reasonable, and try to split the remaining space 50/50 for Windows and Ubuntu. The 7.04 release, I must say, seems particularly buggy. Numerous people complain of Xserver issues when running the LiveCD (like me), not having any sound (like me), and with my particular laptop model there are graphics card driver and screen issues that require some tweaking. In fact, my laptop model (or rather the hardware used in it) is probably the source for a lot of these woes. Particularly the ATI Mobility X1600 graphics card. Apparently ATI doesn't much support the Linux community and their drivers are crappy.
^That's geek-speak for "Oops, I screwed up."
Wednesday night, Mom said that she'd had it and that this was the last time. We dug out an old saw bit and finished all the drilling needed for our deadbolt on the back door. She said she'd be cutting off his cell phone (yes, she's still got him on her plan) immediately. About that time the sheriff's deputy came over. Nice young lady, very sympathetic and conversational. Told us there wasn't much they could do. After she left, we found out that the deadbolt guide had, despite all the instructions that came with both the lock and the guide itself, been off by nearly 1/4 inch in telling us where to place the hole for housing the lock mechanism. The deadbolt is unusable, in fact we can't even put the whole thing in. I hope we can find a replacement that fits our new holes in the door, being about 3/8 of an inch longer than the standard size. If not, we'll probably have to replace the whole door.
For all Mom's seeming resolve that night, she wasn't holding up on her end. Every day I asked her if she was going to turn off his cell phone like she promised. "Not today, I'm tired." Friday night she was all to eager to let Britain come over and have some money. She also revealed that, despite her swearing up and down the previous nights, she was going to allow Britain's phone to remain active "until Tuesday or Wednesday of next week," allegedly so that he could give a recruiter for the National Guard a number to call. I lost my temper then and basically screamed "NO!" at her without hardly meaning to. I said that Britain wouldn't be coming over here, and he wouldn't be getting any money. As a compromise, I said that I'd go over to his apartment and take him grocery shopping (to make sure he was using it to buy food and not drugs). I told her to cut off his phone while I was gone. She didn't. I told her that dealing with her was like trying to tell an alcoholic that they can't just have "one more drink," reminded her that her enabling is only encouraging him and it's just as big of a problem for her as his drug habit is for him. She was pretty mad the rest of the night and we didn't speak. I have reason to think she's taking some of her anger and frustration about this situation out on me, behind my back.
I'm not going to allow her to keep backsliding, make excuses for and be duped by that manipulative liar. I'm not going to let him keep taking from us and wearing us down. I'm trying desperately to think of some way to make this clear to her without laying on a full-fledged (and rest assured, vicious) guilt trip, or stripping her of all seeming authority in the matter. Maybe that last one will have to go, though. There are bigger things at stake than her ego, like the safety of this family.
[ The following will have hyperlinks for educational purposes. And because I'm bored. ]
In other news, I finally managed to get some of my Ubuntu Live CDs working yesterday and installed Feisty Fawn on the laptop. Shortly thereafter, in trying to fix a sound problem (I couldn't hear any!) via a guide posted on the official Ubuntu Forums, I managed (through no actual doing of my own) to purge the Gnome display manager and the Ubuntu Desktop Environment, leaving me with no graphical user interface. I couldn't reinstall them totally because of missing dependencies, so they still don't work and now my Linux install is verborken. Thanks a ton, Ubuntu Forum. :\
I should point out that Ubuntu still, technically, WORKS, just in a text-only mode that's practically unusable to me as a newbie. Gotta admit, that -is- pretty durable. I don't know what would happen if I had baleeted Windows Explorer and tried to use XP.
I'm going to repartition and selectively reformat the drive. The installation was more space-constrained than I would have liked. I apparently have a 100G hard drive, with 55G devoted to a Windows C:\ partition and 35G going to some unknown but mostly empty D:\ partition, plus 10G for the Asus recovery stuff. When Ubuntu installed the first time, it repartitioned the Windows sector and split the 55G between XP and Ubuntu, giving me very little relative space for either one.
I think I'm going to use GNU Parted to erase the broken Ubuntu partition, stretch Windows out a bit, shrink the mysterious 35G section to something more reasonable, and try to split the remaining space 50/50 for Windows and Ubuntu. The 7.04 release, I must say, seems particularly buggy. Numerous people complain of Xserver issues when running the LiveCD (like me), not having any sound (like me), and with my particular laptop model there are graphics card driver and screen issues that require some tweaking. In fact, my laptop model (or rather the hardware used in it) is probably the source for a lot of these woes. Particularly the ATI Mobility X1600 graphics card. Apparently ATI doesn't much support the Linux community and their drivers are crappy.
^That's geek-speak for "Oops, I screwed up."