How to explain utter stupidity.

Julia and I were at the swim club almost ready to leave for her clinic time. She got in the back seat. I was about to get into the front seat when Julia asked for her glasses. She broke her glasses for the third time last Thursday a week after she got them.  We were still using the costume frames which had gotten her through the winter and spring. But in June she broke the side piece off the original pair of frames when she was trying to bend it. Can’t bend such cheap metal. I found a similar pair online ordered it and changed out the lens but in another two weeks she broke it again.  I took partial blame for that break because Julia lens are prisms, the glasses not corrective but therapeutic.  The prism have a specific orientation which I forgot about when I asked a local eye glass store to put the lens in the new frame. Perhaps she fooled with the side piece until it broke because the lens were uncomfortable.

I bought a third frame and this time sent it to Milwaukee where the lens were made. The glasses were back in a week with the lens properly installed. And then Julia fooled with the side pieces again and again broke the frames.  I had already made the decision to get her sturdy, conventional frames when we see the eye doc next week and was only hoping to use the third pair until we got the new glasses. Breaking the third pair meant was due not to uncomfortable glasses but an obsession of bending the side pieces over and over again when Julia took them off getting ready for bed. She admitted that she liked the bending. Autism can blind side me at a moment’s notice.

I taped the side arm onto the front of the frame and made Julia wear those glasses. She had a very hard time keeping them on but there you have natural consequences. We went to a glasses place in town because although her eye doc is in Chicago I was determined that the glasses would be made and fitted in Madison. We had gone to a store at Hilldale a few weeks ago and began looking at frames at which point Julia refused to look at anything else but round harry potter type frames. We found a few that were plastic, round and very expensive but I was willing to consider them if she would wear them. Last Saturday,we revisited the store to pick out frames so that they could be ordered and ready when we had Julia’s prescription.  This time she didn’t want round plastic frames even though I had told her that with the breaking of the third frame, I was going for sturdy and something that would not tempt her to play with the arms.  I wanted to get as far from the HP glasses as possible. She wanted wire frames. I was almost ready to leave the store and revisit another day when she put on a pair of purple metal frames and declared that she liked them.  The frames are not round or in any way resemble HP glasses.  They are sturdy.

While we were at the store I asked if there was anyway that they could improve on the awful taping job I did on the broken frames.  Because these are therapeutic glasses I didn’t want her to miss the time wearing them. Natural consequences be damned!  A very sweet woman took on the challenge.  Using thin plastic tubing she put some on the arm and some of what was left of the connecting hinge. Then she heated both ends and put them together.  Then she retaped, doing a much better job than I did and heated it all again.   The results are somewhat sturdier than what I managed to do and Julia says they are more comfortable. In an effort to have glasses time from now until her new pair arrives, she does not wear them when she is alone. So the glasses stay with me when she goes up to bed and when I am taking my water aerobics class.

And so . . .  yesterday as we were getting into the car after swimming, Julia asked to put on her glasses. The glasses were on my dash board and I was half into the car.  I threw my swim bag into the passenger seat, carefully placed my laptop on top of the car and reached for the glasses and put them on her.   What happened next is sort of a blur.  You know, all those things you do automatically, like retrieving the laptop from the car hood and carefully placing it on the passenger seat in my car.  I guess I didn’t do that. Of course, I almost never leave anything on the roof of my car so I had very little practice automatically retrieving. And oh, the operating words are ‘almost never.’

When we arrived at IDS clinic, no laptop was beside me.  I retraced my steps expecting to find my crumpled electronic companion crushed and broken in the swim club parking lot but when I got there it wasn’t there.  It was not on the grass or under another car, no one had turned it into the front desk and it wasn’t anywhere on the surrounding streets. The next day no one had turned it into the police.  Just gone. Which is kinda spooky.  The Shorewood Swim Club is the kind of place where spare change and single socks are turned in.

I needed to moan.  I remembered that this was the laptop that was new during David’s transplant and I learned and set it up during the days of hospital sitting.  I could recite other nostalgic remembering but after some groaning to Cheshire it was over.  I have a backup that is two weeks old, my purse will suffer (I had been congratulating myself for very low expenses this summer.  So much for silly pride ), I had a plan to use that laptop as an at home machine and buy as iPad for traveling soon.  I have had that plan for a few months and been thinking “soon” for awhile now.  But it will be exciting having a ‘latest’ model with the new bells and whistles.   And as for uncanny luck, last weekend when I was having trouble with the tracking pad, I managed to print out all of my passwords. Here are a few sheets that I’ve made great use of in the last 24 hours.

The biggest fall out apart from the prospect of blowing the economical summer is this soup that I had started on Tuesday morning.  It is an African chicken and peanut soup with a tomato and coconut base.  Julia loves it.  The most important part to gettin’ it right is to put in the correct spices in the correct amounts.  There were only two steps left to do when I left the house on Tuesday morning.  One being spicing the soup.  Unfortunately, the recipe was on my computer, and a thorough search later in the day proved fruitless.  And so, a mostly made pot of soup sits in the frig awaiting the dumping of the backup into the new machine.

Update:  I used Julia’s iPad for two days as my sole computer and it wasn’t bad.  I was not ready to give up the roominess of a laptop to store all my odds and ends, but I was happier than I thought I was going to be.  An iPad and a keyboard would be great to travel with.

I bought a new laptop — the newest MacBook Pro with Retina.  The model has been very recently updates.  It is much like my old model but tweaked to be quicker and slimmer (umm, I’d like to be tweaked to be quicker and slimmer.).  I haven’t restored my backups, so I am without music and pictures and documents.  But, at least I am back to pecking away at the keys.

I have been too preoccupied to find time and energy to write.  I didn’t expect this would be a re-entry post but it is.  Such foibles.   Such foolishness.