I’ve been pretty quiet for the past 10 days. Mostly, this has been due to prepping for, celebrating and recovering from Dad’s 80th birthday, which was on Monday. My sister flew out from Chicago last Friday and was here until Tuesday morning, when I drove her to the airport literally at the crack of dawn. Dad’s birthday was a huge success, but quite a lot went into accomplishing that.
Dad was really dreading this birthday, he said, and he seemed really down and depressed. He was going through his annual indecision about conducting the Townsend Military Band concerts this summer, and this time he seemed more determined to quit than in the past. He was getting so tired during the concerts, he said, and he was sick of “arguing with people.” He needed to start working on the music folders and he hadn’t started yet. And he was down because his friend who has been staying at the house was talking more about moving out, and he was depressed about his weight and his health, and…well, he was just down. Of course, he misses Mom a lot, too.
So, my sister and I were really concerned, and my sister said that she felt bad that she wasn’t giving Dad “a really big present of some kind.” But when asked, Dad just said there was nothing he wanted. I was going to redesign his business card for him, but it seemed like every time we talked, we never got as far as that topic, and then I wasn’t sure he needed a card if he was going to quit conducting the band.
Last Wednesday, I was chewing all this over, and I had an inspiration on what to give Dad for a gift. For at least a couple of years now, Dad has been talking about flat-screen TVs. My sister and brother-in-law have one, and dad comes home from visiting in Chicago talking about how amazing it is. He’ll look at them in stores, and he came really close to buying one. But then he just wouldn’t do it: the cost ran into his Depression-era frugality wall and he wouldn’t spend the money. He’d keep bringing up the subject, but then he’d insist that his very large old conventional TV “has just as good a picture as those flat screens, really” and “I don’t think those flat screen TVs are any better than my TV” and so on. But he’d keep talking about them. And of course, he’s super into watching football, and he watches a lot of TV. He has a Comcast bundle, with digital TV and high speed Internet, and twice he offered to pay for me to have cable turned back on in my house and I had to reiterate that I hate cable, never watch TV and didn’t want it, no matter who paid for it. But TV is important to Dad.
But the clincher, finally, was when Dad came down to see my new computer, which has a 22-inch HD monitor, and I was showing him some of the things I was doing with it. I showed him one of the iTunes programs I download. Dad was really impressed. “That’s even better than your TV!” he exclaimed. I think he then said something about his TV being perfectly good, etc. But his TV has had a few misadventures, including almost falling on my niece once (it weighs a couple hundred pounds), and has some burned out pixels right in the center of the screen and an off-color blotch on one side of the picture.
So, last Wednesday I called my sister and suggested that we go halvsies and buy Dad a flat screen HD TV for his birthday. We’d have to surprise him, because if we asked him about it first, he’d never agree. But I was sure that he’d be pleased if it was just presented to him as a birthday surprise. Jill liked the idea, so I spent the next couple of days researching TVs online.
Of course, we immediately ran into some disparities of shopping styles, since I prefer to buy electronics online, happily set up everything myself, and am very geeky, while my sister is a total technophobe who lets her hubbie handle all the electronics purchasing, prefers to buy in a store and will pay for the store to come in and install. I deferred to Jill in all of that, because it wasn’t vital for me to get my way when I wasn’t paying for the whole thing. There was a brand new discount electronics store in the area called Ultimate Electronics, and we decided to check that place out first.
Jill flew in Friday afternoon, and I went up and spent the evening with everyone at the lake. For the next four days, I spent so much time at the lake, and consequently was so off my usual routines and backlogged on my work, I felt like I’d been away at a convention! The weekend got off to a slightly bumpy start, and we did wind up in one big painful conversation about stuff Dad was unhappy about, but that was on Saturday night. He’d gone to see a movie with Jill, and after that, Jill and I went TV shopping, and we were still keeping his gift a secret.
We went to Ultimate Electronics, where we were so obviously serious shoppers as we pored over the pros and cons of different models and sizes, that the sales associate came over and gave us each a bottle of free spring water! We finally decided on a Toshiba, a 40-inch HD LED model within our budget, and I popped for a filtering power strip and a set of component video cables for the DVD player. We got an extended service plan and paid for delivery and installation when the store said they could deliver Monday, on Dad’s birthday. We’re splitting the cost evenly, but Jill put it all on her credit card because she gets frequent flyer mile credits that way. 🙂
By Sunday, the weekend really started to improve. Dad’s decided to conduct the Townsend band after all, and he and Jill got his music library inventoried. He wants to take a week off to go on a trip in July and he negotiated that with the band’s manager. (It’s the one week that I’d miss his concert because of Readercon, too, how perfect is that?) One of Dad’s issues in the painful conversation had been his feeling that he “couldn’t play his music” in his house because people asked him to turn it off. Jill and I were completely mystified by this, so on Sunday, we turned Dad’s stereo on while he was napping so the classical music station was playing when Dad got up. Then we asked him to get his turntable going, because we weren’t sure how it worked and we didn’t want to fiddle with it. We all listened to some of Dad’s records. As far as I could see, we ALL enjoyed the music, both popular vocals and classical, and this seemed to mean a LOT to Dad.
We were spending several hours each evening watching DVDs of Fringe, which Dad has become totally enthralled by. Now, I wanted to see Fringe a lot, and I’m really enjoying it, but I just can’t stand to simply sit and watch TV anymore. Sitting there for hours at a time four nights in a row really taxed my endurance, I have to admit. So, on Sunday afternoon when Jill suggested that maybe we could watch a video, I’d said, “No, let’s do something interactive–how about playing a game or doing a jigsaw puzzle or something?” Jill and I found the coolest puzzle down in the basement that none of us had done before. It was a very old jigsaw puzzle with an 18th century painting as its picture. Jill, Dad and I all worked on it and we finished it the same night. But at one point, trying to find some information on the painting, we turned the box over, and there were penciled notes on the bottom: a name, and “completed” with a date in 1938. Then there was another date in 1940. That’s how old that puzzle is, and I don’t think it’s been used much since because it’s almost mint condition. One of my folks picked it up at a yard sale or something, and it’s more than 70 years old!
I love that kind of stuff.
I cooked sauteed veggies and broiled fish for dinner on Sunday. Then we told dad about his present, because he needed to decide what to do with his old TV. The store installation crew would take it away if he wanted them to, but we thought he might like to think about his options ahead of time. Well…Dad was just blown away to be getting a flat screen TV. He was so thrilled, he didn’t make a single peep about it’s being too expensive or oh-you-shouldn’t-have. “I never thought I’d get one of those,” he said. He elected to have the old one hauled away.
The TV was delivered on Monday, right on time. I cooked Dad his requests for a birthday dinner: meatloaf, gravy and mash, and his “birthday cake” was a key lime pie, which I made from scratch with the butter pastry crust I’d used for the quiche in December and filling made from fresh limes. It had a whipped cream topping on which I put these little plastic figurines of marching band players that Jill brought with her from Chicago–those were really cute–and candles. So, dinner was all Dad’s favorites, and everything came out perfectly. Dad’s friend wants the recipe for the meat loaf and I’ll have to reconstruct it, because it was one of those, “Take a large bowl and start throwing stuff into it” kind of things. 🙂
On Monday, Dad said it was the best birthday he’d ever had. 🙂 He’s already upgraded his Comcast cable to HD and gotten the new cable box for it. And he has it just in time for the NFL draft!
I stayed at the house after everyone went to bed on Monday night, and sat up working on Pig, because Jill and I were leaving for the airport at 4:00 a.m. I’d be getting home just a little later than my usual bed time these days; Jill was going straight to work when she arrived in Chicago! I was pretty wiped out, but I wasn’t driving recklessly, and there was really no excuse for the cop in Jaffrey, New Hampshire who pulled me over and claimed I was traveling 41 mph in a 30 mph zone. (gasp) He gave me a warning. *grump* Aside from that, the airport run went smoothly!
The reason I’m just now “recovering” from the weekend is two-fold: first, after the painful conversation on Saturday evening I got almost no sleep, and was already dragging from that. Second, as soon as I got home Tuesday morning I came down with a brief but intense bout of gastric upset, which I haven’t heard affected anyone else, so I don’t think it was anything we ate. I’m so rarely sick, this knocked me right off balance, and I still was exhausted and low-energy as a result most of yesterday. I still managed to get up on Tuesday, do a bunch of chores and make my biweekly trip to the transfer station with the trash and recyclables, and I did my laundry up at Dad’s house on Monday so I could maximize my time up there. But I skipped workout on Tuesday night and it takes a lot for me to do that.
So that’s where most of my energy has been going! But given how well Dad’s birthday turned out, it was certainly worth it!
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