My Family! Yay! I Love Them! We Route Around Outages!
So, as those of you who are on the Hrafnar list know, dpaxson's daughter-in-law is in the hospital for a mastectomy here in Berkeley, and my grandmother is recovering from an aortic aneurysm repair in Philadelphia.
This isn't really about that, it's a discussion of wacky family hijinks, and how we deal with them.
My grandmother is in Philadelphia, living with or near two of her daughters, R- and T-. R- has a history of deciding she no longer wants to talk to people, starting with my father, and now including me. The lot of us are stubborn cusses, so this isn't likely to change any time soon.
However, T- texts my Dad with updates--yay! Dad then passes texts along to my two brothers (M- and W-) and myself. But he doesn't talk to Mom, whom he divorced twenty-plus years ago.
Ever since W- married a woman who's every bit as obnoxious as I am, yet without my brilliance and redeeming charms, but with a casual disregard for boundaries and some really spiteful thoughts about who's going to Hell, W- unfortunately got estranged by association.
Grandma, as matriarch, is Not Amused by all of this not-talking. She demands that lines of communication remain open, thank you, and that not-talking is extremely silly and it Has. To. STOP. For her, you have to understand, she was being extremely forceful; she taught me a lot about many things, including remaining cheerful in adversity. Watching her blow her cool over this shook me.
Well.
Not enough to actually talk to W-, so apparently not enough. *looks off into the distance, humming at nothing*
But Dad, spurred my genteel reminder that his mother did not approve of Not Talking, decided that he should fill W- in, and wondered if he had the latest number. One of the legs along which to verify that was Mom...so I called Mom.
I filled her in, then got a new possible number for W-. Then, when that number turned out to no longer work, I called M- at work (because his cell phone still works...), and while he had no newer cell # for W-, he does have him as a buddy on RealID, the identification/social/gaming chat service promoted by Blizzard Entertainment, purveyors of many games ending in -craft. He'll get in touch with W- on WoW tonight and close the loop.
What amuses me about all of this is that it's an exercise in network dynamics.
Whenever one, as a wee nerdlet, has the Matrix Internet explained to them, one of the things they say early on is, "the Internet is designed to route around outages".
Neurologists have recently found out that your brain does too, by the by.
And now, as my family proves today, so do humans. 8-)
-- Lorrie
This isn't really about that, it's a discussion of wacky family hijinks, and how we deal with them.
My grandmother is in Philadelphia, living with or near two of her daughters, R- and T-. R- has a history of deciding she no longer wants to talk to people, starting with my father, and now including me. The lot of us are stubborn cusses, so this isn't likely to change any time soon.
However, T- texts my Dad with updates--yay! Dad then passes texts along to my two brothers (M- and W-) and myself. But he doesn't talk to Mom, whom he divorced twenty-plus years ago.
Ever since W- married a woman who's every bit as obnoxious as I am, yet without my brilliance and redeeming charms, but with a casual disregard for boundaries and some really spiteful thoughts about who's going to Hell, W- unfortunately got estranged by association.
Grandma, as matriarch, is Not Amused by all of this not-talking. She demands that lines of communication remain open, thank you, and that not-talking is extremely silly and it Has. To. STOP. For her, you have to understand, she was being extremely forceful; she taught me a lot about many things, including remaining cheerful in adversity. Watching her blow her cool over this shook me.
Well.
Not enough to actually talk to W-, so apparently not enough. *looks off into the distance, humming at nothing*
But Dad, spurred my genteel reminder that his mother did not approve of Not Talking, decided that he should fill W- in, and wondered if he had the latest number. One of the legs along which to verify that was Mom...so I called Mom.
I filled her in, then got a new possible number for W-. Then, when that number turned out to no longer work, I called M- at work (because his cell phone still works...), and while he had no newer cell # for W-, he does have him as a buddy on RealID, the identification/social/gaming chat service promoted by Blizzard Entertainment, purveyors of many games ending in -craft. He'll get in touch with W- on WoW tonight and close the loop.
What amuses me about all of this is that it's an exercise in network dynamics.
Whenever one, as a wee nerdlet, has the Matrix Internet explained to them, one of the things they say early on is, "the Internet is designed to route around outages".
Neurologists have recently found out that your brain does too, by the by.
And now, as my family proves today, so do humans. 8-)
-- Lorrie