Win, lose or catch 'em all

I'm tired.

This is the third time I've started a post that way this week. Fingers crossed, the third time will take.

Mom's had a difficult week. She came unglued a few hours after reading a chapter in her light-hearted cozy Christmas mystery novel I found for her at the library, convinced I was trying to hide snakes in her bed and sticks in her meatloaf. None of those things happened in the book, for the record. As I refer to it, she adds 2 to purple and gets fish. Her brain leaps around and makes connections fueled  by paranoia. I got her calmed down, quicker than I expected that night, but it was the second night in the week she had a complete meltdown. I got her settled in bed for the night, triple checked with her for snakes, and offered to put something on the television in her room to watch to help occupy her brain.

If a mild mannered mystery about a Christmas pageant in a small town triggers her, then just imagine how long it took me to find something relatively safe for her to watch. No cartoons or anything magical or out of reality. Nothing sad or religious. Absolutely nothing with the slightest hint of suspense or violence. Nothing with story lines that involve any kind of spying/covert ops/secret societies/conspiracy theories/etc. The list goes on. She specifically asked for nothing that involved the holidays because it would make her think about the book.

I settled on the PG-rated large, ethnic marriage movie. God bless Nia Vardalos. She'll never know how her movie, beloved by so many (even my cranky older folks), soothed the paranoid twitch in my mom that night. Well, after over an hour of me talking her through it and then the just-in-case medicine prescribed by her doctor. Still, it kept her mind occupied.

It's starting to look like this less stable, more easily upset version of my mother may be here to stay. Her doctor and I are both kind of leaning that way.

I'm not entirely sure if I should tackle what happened at the end of the week with her, under the banner of TMI. So much TMI. Sufficed to say, if you know someone with an issue with constipation, Aldi's brand prune juice works as well as the prescription strength stuff gastroenterologists give patients to clean out their systems before a colonoscopy. Also, adult diapers are not leakproof in that department. Oh, and my parents need a new bathmat. And the funny videos of the dads' retching while changing a baby's diaper? My dad makes that noise now. And I almost peed my pants laughing when he did. The man who changed our cloth diapers and cleaned them, overcome by the whole thing.

You have got to laugh. You have to. Crying doesn't make the mopping go any faster.

And then there's this pokémon thing. This fricking pokémon thing. Want to play with friends? I can't connect. Want to go for a walk? I can't login. In the middle of restocking game supplies (for free)? Server takes a dive. And then I noticed a friend of mine who is also testing out the game was able to catch something not long after I got booted from the server for several hours. I did a little digging. Okay, googling. And I discovered users who registered the way I did, creating a trainer account and NOT using their Google credentials, are having a much more difficult time with their game access taking a dive.

As I bitched to my husband after being locked out of my account this afternoon (again), he suggested I create a separate Google account for gaming credentials. Separate password, blah blah blah, so that if hackers did go after accounts or personal info, there's nothing of importance there. Well shit. Where was that suggestion a week ago? With a literal middle finger at the "sorry, we're working on restoring your access as soon as we can" message on the trainer account webpage, I set up a gaming email, loaded up the app and was creating an avatar in the blink of an eye. Son of a pus-filled shrew, not the slightest hesitation or issue. And of course, all the freaking critters I collected over the last week and the eggs incubating are stuck in my original account if I can ever get in it again. I had even hatched a ghost pokémon and caught almost all of my favorites. But this new account? I started off with a Pikachu. Which might make up for all the aggravation. Because, I mean, come on. It's Pikachu.