Much has happened these last two weeks!
There are a few things that I can't blog about in order to protect the privacy of those involved, but there was so much stuff going on that I have plenty of other things that I can talk about.

First off, my father had a heart attack a couple of days after I posted my last post. He's doing as doing as well as can be expected for someone who cannot have any surgery. His first heart attack was over 40 years ago and the treatment this time is pretty much the same, except instead of spending 30 days in the hospital, he was sent home after 1/2 a week. Mind you, getting sent home right away is a huge improvement for the patient over staying in the hospital for a month, but the whole rest/recuperation, nitroglycerin for the angina pain and "hope for the best" type of treatment is straight from 40 years ago. But since there was no surgery or other obvious treatment, we have to keep reminding him of that old 30 days in the hospital routine when he gets frustrated that he's not bouncing back right away. There's a whole lot of saying, "No, you can't do that yet!" Hmm... in retrospect, maybe locking them up in a hospital for 30 days had some merit.

Then, the day after my father had his heart attack, I learned that the technical writer they had hired at work had accepted another job and was leaving at the end of the month instead of the end of October. As a result, I moved to the IT department full time this week and starting next Monday, I'm totally my own as the sole tech writer without the benefit of those three months of training. Ack!

But despite my father's heart attack, I have managed to cram an incredible amount of information into my head in the last two weeks. A bit of it was about technical writing, but much of it was researching software programs for code documentation and then learning how to use them (the tech writer had not used them before either.) In order to do that I had to learn a bit about the code I'm going to be documenting as well as test a multitude of software options in order to decide the best one to use. In addition, some of that code documentation was due by yesterday (I met the deadline) and I also had to learn a few other things there were not related to technical writing in order to provide backup for an IT person who was on vacation this week.

It was a pretty wild ride these last two weeks and yesterday evening, I was winding down with a old friend of mine by reviewing my two week cram session. I was also expressing my doubts about being able to do this new job and he just laughed and said, "Of course you can do it, because you are crazy smart." That made me laugh too because I've never considered myself "smart" and if he had just said "smart" or "super smart" then I would have immediately disagreed, but I was okay with "crazy smart". And that's the great thing about old friends, after so many, many years they know you well enough to know exactly what to say when you need a boost.

And in other news, a sad thing happened this week when my next-door neighbors, D&S, moved away to another place on Wednesday. They couldn't hang with the recent lot rent increase and found another place that is $200/month cheaper. They tried really hard to get me to move with them, but their new place doesn't allow dogs. We do plan to stay in touch and they are close enough that I can visit them on a weekend. Still, I will miss the day-to-day contact we used to have.

And with the recent monthly lot rent increase, I'm not likely to have another long-term neighbor any time soon. Many of the old-timers that have been in the RV park for years have pulled out this month. It will be interesting to see how the RV park culture changes if it ends up being mostly short-timers in the future.