Hard Drive, Hard Pains, Family Lessons

I love laptops where the hard drive is under a panel, like the one illustrated above….but I couldn’t have that type of luck….

I had to remove the keyboard, the touchpad and panel, a few other things just to get to the hard drive. Good news though, I was able to get everything I needed from it using this neat tool like the one below.

Plug in power cord, attach usb, attach to hard drive, turn on and it became another hard drive on my computer.  I copied the files I needed, starting with the nearly 60 gigs of pictures.  Now I have the pictures on our backup laptop, and on this old laptop hard drive.  Eventually I will need to get another laptop, but I am going to take my time and get what I want at the price I am willing to pay.

Mom likes the pictures of the garden…she can’t wait to come home to see it, but I know the truth is that she just can’t wait to come home period.  Probably come home for a few hours visit again this weekend, and she hopes to be out for good a week from Friday….we sure hope so.

As for me, the legs are getting much better.  Could hardly walk on Tuesday, did pretty good on Wednesday, but today my right leg just would not “stretch out” until the ibuprofen kicked in.  

So we had a meeting with the Skilled Nursing facility people on Wednesday pertaining to mom.  Mom, Dad, sister Patty, Marcia and I met with the Occupational Therapist (OT), the Business Office representative, and the facilities “social worker”.  The case nurse was unable to be there, but they were going to pass on notes to them.  The OT gave a progress report, but would not give us their best guess as to when mom would be coming home.  When asked what the average time is for hip replacement stays she says, “We don’t have an average time.”  Family lesson one, it is not hard to come up with an average…which is when she finally said, “less than a month.”  Then the “Business Office” person gives her report.  Medicare will pay 100% for first 20 days, then they pay 80% and the back-up insurance does not cover anything.  Hence, they want 14 days up front for the time she “might” be there beyond the 20 days, but would settle for 7 days since her progress is going well.  Family lesson two, “absolutely not!”.   When told it is their “company policy”, dad says, “What are you going to do, kick her out if we don’t pay 7 days for something we don’t even know we are going to use yet?”  “Oh no, sir, we would never kick her out.”  “Well, it is ‘OUR’ family policy to not pay for something we don’t know we are going to use.”  Ok, Business Person is blown out of the water….time to unload our big guns now. We then talked to them about some of the shortcomings mom has experienced, but assured them that for the most part, everyone has been so nice and in general we have been pleased.  I don’t want to go into the shortcomings, but let’s just say, they seemed to be alarmed by a few things we shared with them.

One thing I had to replace was Photoshop Elements, going to version 12 from version 11.  I think I am going to like this version more than the older version….sure going to have fun with it.

  

The picture to the left is what I published in my last blog, the one on the right is in this blog. Same picture, but the one on the right is cropped, and touched up a bit to make the lawn look better.  To me, taking good pictures need to be followed up with a touch of Photoshop to help the picture look more presentable.   Most of these pictures only need a slight adjustment to the “lighting”, some need a slight touch of color, but most need to be cropped.  Old photographers once did this in the dark room…now it is done quick and easy on a computer.