No Rest for the Weary

The easy recovery spin on Monday felt surprisingly good and I was happy to find my legs were none the worse for wear after Sunday's training ride. I was, of course, fully expecting to get in a long ride this morning, but fate had other plans.

Some time around mid-afternoon The Wife decided we needed to drive up to Baton Rouge fairly urgently. Reports were that her mother's health was looking worse and worse. So the original idea was to drive up right after work, stay a few hours, and drive back late at night. Around 4:30 we stopped by our house to change and gather up some stuff, and at that point she said "we'd probably better bring a change of clothes." I wasn't really surprised and threw some clean underwear and a toothbrush into my Timbuk2 bag. Indeed, when we arrived at the nursing home some two hours later, her mother was considerably more unresponsive than usual. Of course, we ended up spending the night in the room. Around 10:30 pm The Wife asked me to go find her some Starbucks coffee. I figured all the Starbucks' were surely closed by then, but I went out anyway in search of caffeine and found a CC's that was open until 11:00. By then it was 10:45 and they were out of the dark roast, so I settled for a cup of medium, picked up a nonfat latte for The Wife, and had just enough time to use their free wireless to download email before returning to the wireless-free nursing home for a very long and uncomfortable night watching very old sitcoms and those real estate and remodeling shows that all seem identical to me. At least the drone of the O2 pump provided some white noise to block out the "I don't like the color of this $15,000 granite countertop so we'll have to change that" comments on the TV.

This morning her mother seemed much more alert and responsive and the general consensus was that she had probably suffered some sort of TIA (likely not her first, nor her last). Of course, the prognosis is far from good, but at least things were showing some signs, however temporary, of improvement. Anyway, we finally drove back to NOLA around noon, showered, and went to the office where I am currently struggling to keep my head off of the desktop.