Oh what a groovy day. Not.

As always, went shopping with my mother, a little bit for myself, mostly for things she might need around the house, since I’m here to carry and install shit for her.

The thing you need to know for later is that my mother has two wallets – one for cash, one for credit cards and ID.

We get to Costco and she discovers she doesn’t have the 2nd wallet with her, no Costco card. She wants to go but like, we’re the only ones who’ve ever shown up without our card? Of course she can get a temporary one. It’s a good chance for me to load up on over-the-counter drugs, too. Someone will have to check and tell me how much Imodium is at Watson or Manning, I’m sure it’s around 10 or 20 pills for close to HK$100 or US$13. I got 400 of the generic “Kirkland” brand for US$9. And so on down the line. And the fact that she doesn’t have her credit cards with her means we don’t have to have the usual argument over who’s paying, I win by default.

Lunch at Nathan’s. Nathan’s hot dogs. Yum.

I go into Best Buy. I get the DVD of Food, Inc., because I want her to see it. (And I want you to see it, too!) And I get her a Cisco/Linksys wireless router. It ought to solve my connection problems at her place and after I leave, provide a better firewall for her. Nothing fancy, just 802.11g will be enough.

I pop into Modell’s, a sporting goods chain. Everyone else in the world had the same idea. Buy Yankees World Series Champions merch. Coupla t-shirts. Some nice hats but they’re sized and they don’t have anything close to my size.

Kosher butcher.

Bed Bath and Beyond, some stuff for her bathroom.

Then a discount drug store chain. She wants to load up on soaps and shampoos. I want to get some Dr. Scholl’s foot things. These shoe inserts to provide more arch support. They sell Dr. Scholl’s in Hong Kong but every shop where I find it, they don’t have my size. Here they not only have my size, they have what seems like a hundred more varieties than you can find in HK.

Stop off at a nearby “gourmet shop,” kind of a Bronx version of City Super, but bigger and cheaper. I grab some stuff for me for weekend lunches (prosciutto, provolone, etc.) and some cooked things I can nuke for dinner.

Back home.

NOW … she goes looking for that second wallet. She can’t find it. We tear the house apart. When did she see it last? She’s not sure. What was she wearing? She’s not sure. But she’s convinced that I threw it down the garbage shoot. Great. I tell her it’s probably in the car. She says no way. So we tear the house apart one more time. Now she’s almost at the point of collapse at the thought of having to get new drivers license, car registration and god knows how many credit cards reissued. I don’t say a word, put on my coat, go down to the car, and of course it’s on the floor next to the seat.

Okay, one crisis averted.

After dinner, we watch Food, Inc. Unbelievably, she’s glued to the TV and hardly talking while it’s on. (My mother hasn’t stopped talking in the 55 years I’ve known her. I’ve probably inherited this bad habit from her but it’s also why I go for women who can appreciate the zen beauty of silence. My gf can do this, but it did take her a little while to catch on.)(I also come to realize that while my gf is someone I can be with 24/7 without feeling irrationally irritated or frustrated, my mother is best taken in short doses and we’ve been together non-stop for the entire day. I understand, she lives alone, she’s grateful to have me in the house and someone to talk to all day long, but I’m hitting the wall.)

(Actually I hit the wall by lunch, when she decided to try to bash my gf, whom she’s never met or talked to. But since my gf is not white, not Jewish, not rich, not other things on the list, she’s not appropriate for me. She says, “Try not to get upset but I want to tell you …” And I cut her off. “Before you start to speak, think carefully. What is the result you hope to get? Do you think if you say something negative about her I’ll break up with her because of that? Or do you think I’ll just get upset? And if what you want to say isn’t going to give you the result you want, why bother to say it in the first place?” Thankfully, that put an end to that conversation. For about an hour ….)

I tell her I want to leave the Food, Inc. DVD with her, that she should loan it to all her friends. But she says none of her friends have DVD players.

Meanwhile, I’m staring at the box that’s been delivered. It’s a combination cable decoder and DVR that she ordered. Why didn’t she get installation? She didn’t want to pay the $35. I know nothing about her cable TV provider and have no experience using a DVR. With my luck, I will totally disable cable TV if and when I try to get this hooked in. And then the joy of trying to teach her to use it, since she refuses to read instruction manuals. She still has a VCR, the clock is still flashing at 00:00.)

And then I go to install the Linksys router. Mindful of the problems I had getting my laptop to work on her internet connection, I recycle her cable modem after everything else is installed. It all works after that, except the speed is so slow, it can be measured in Kbps, not Mbps – and I’m not talking 100Kbps or 500Kbps, I’m talking more like dial-up speeds. On both the wired connection to her PC and the wireless connection to my MacBook.

A bit of research online, I figure out how to clone her PC’s MAC address on the router, but that doesn’t solve the problem. And I’m tired now. Tomorrow I’ll call the Cisco help line and see if they can figure it out. If not, it goes back to Best Buy I suppose.

Tomorrow is going to be a joy, at least until I can leave late afternoon and head down to MSG for the Springsteen show.