I arrived at my grandmother’s house in Tigard, Oregon
power lift reclining chair
My grandmother Elsie Battaglia is 99 years old.
Starting on April 1, 2011, she hasn’t been feeling well, and she sounds extremely tired on the phone. She’s had an array of tests completed by her doctors, and they can find nothing wrong. In fact, her doctor said she is ‘remarkably healthy’ and that there’s no reason for her to be at the hospital.
Even so, she sounds so lethargic on the phone that I am concerned. She is sleeping 12 hours a day, which is quite unusual for her.
I decided to skip the TiG aluminum welding class I had signed up for last evening at TechShop in Menlo Park, California.
Instead, I began driving my car north from San Francisco, California to Tigard, Oregon, which is a suburb of Portland, Oregon.
Note that I never sold my BMW even though I wrote a post in March 2010 advertising it. I didn’t get an offer over the lowest blue book value, so I had a change of heart, as I really love my car. I had wanted to sell it in order to buy a Volkswagon Golf TDI, which gets far better mileage. But Golf TDIs are in short supply and are very expensive on the used market. The new ones can’t run on biodiesel, so they were out of the question.
The drive to my grandmother’s house is 630 mile drive, which is far too much for me to drive in one day, particularly since I drive precisely at the speed limit to save fuel. I drove about 300 miles last evening and stayed at the Sis-Q-Inn Motel at 1825 Shastina Drive in Weed, California.
The drive today was tiring, as I hit Friday afternoon rush hour traffic as I approached Tigard.
I arrived at Elsie’s house around 5pm.
She was reclining in her brand new power activated recliner, similar to this one, that can nearly ‘stand up’ to help her get out of her chair easily. I had never seen such a chair in operation in person, and I was impressed. I saw ads on TV for such chairs when I was a kid — I didn’t understand then how critical a chair could be to someone.
Elsie’s dear friend Char, who has known my grandmother for some 40 years, came over this evening and made dinner for Elsie, Claudia and me. Claudia is Elsie’s friend who lives with her and helps her out. Claudia is an absolute delight, and I am so thankful she is here. She tells Elsie she loves her several times a day.
I am very close to my grandmother. I introduced my last girlfriend to Elsie before I introduced her to my parents.
Elsie got married when she was 16, and had my father when she was 18. Her husband died of a heart defect when she was 23. This was in about 1935, when the country was still in the Great Depression. Her husband’s father owned an apartment building in Portland, and Elsie went to work for him collecting the rent from mostly broke tenants. She describes the work as a tough assignment, but she was persistent and mostly succeeded. The apartment building is still there, and my father and brother went to visit it within the last two years.
I don’t know how long I am going to stay here in Tigard, which is why I drove. I have my laptop with me, and my grandmother has a fast WiFi connection, so I can work effectively from here.
