I got some lovely happy mail today, all the way from my feisty friend Oma Linda waaaaay over in Albuquerque, isn’t this a fab valentine? 

Now I was doing my good service for the elderly today, when I took my gran to get an iPad.  This is her very first computer at the grand old age of 87!  We have often had conversations in the past 5 years or so about how she regretted not going with my Uncle Bill (her brother) when he went to the Silver Surfers sessions at the library in the late ’90s after his wife died.  At the time she feared it would be just another thing that could go wrong, and it would take up space, and it might not catch on anyway…  Now, of course, every time she watches a cooking program on TV, instead of the recipes being available on Ceefax or Teletext, they’re all online, as, I think, are the further info sections for most of the programs she watches.  Anyway, she has macular degeneration, and thought that a keyboard would be too hard for her to see easily, so she had ruled out all the advancing things such as laptops, however when we were down at mum and dad for my dad and aunt’s joint birthdays, she was sitting beside my aunt, who had got an iPad for Christmas.  They had a whale of a time sitting on the sofa playing with this, and finally my gran had found a computer she could live with.  First things first, on the Monday she got straight on to Virgin about hooking her up with broadband, and they duly came last week to install it.  Alas, last Thursday when we were meant to go, it snowed, so we had postponed until today (since my car was in the garage for the last few days being encouraged to bear up).  It’s all home and settled now, but unfortunately the authentication server didn’t feel like playing this evening, so she’s going to get her neighbour to have a shot at it tomorrow.

Entirely unrelated to this, my dad also decided that he just had to spend his birthday money on an iPad too – fear not folks, if you have relatives that work for Apple, my dad is working singlehandedly to keep them in a job, what with the iPhone, iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and iMac (ahem!)  You may also recall that I gave him a Kindle for his birthday (you know, he needed another gadget ;o) ) so he requested that he get a double-decker cover for these for when he’s travelling, and here it is: 

The front pocket will hold the Kindle, plus a cable or two I think, and the main pocket will hold the iPad.  The flap covers both openings so they both, hopefully, remain secure.  I will have to make gran a cover now, but I think I’m fairly safe in the assumption that she can live with a single decker one, unless she wants a front pocket for her CD player that she listens to her books on… 

Linking up to TGIFF and Sew And Tell Friday (buttons in the side bar :o) )