I walked to Kroger and back this morning.

I know, for most healthy people on their feet all the time, that may not seem a big deal, but for me it is a Major Milestone in my recovery.

I checked the weather and my bank account, and decided I would go for a small load of groceries. I’d already had groceries delivered to me yesterday, but my meats and other things I really like to select for myself. So I got my shopping totes ready, along with an rubber strap with hooks at both ends to support the bags on the seat as I came home.

I made it all the way to Kroger in one walk, but I sat on a brick ledge outside to have a smoke and sip of water. I went to tuck the water bottle back into the under-seat basket and realized I’d forgotten to bring the shopping totes with me. Damn it. Oh well, I was there and would use the plastic shopping bags from the store. I got what I needed, most of the stuff did fit into the under-seat basket, and the smaller bag of assorted little things got tied to one of the handles.

I had to pause a few times on the return trip, including a sit-down rest at the spot near Alderson on Manor where I have always taken a rest break for years — an unused former driveway that still suffices for me. And since I have nearly always gone to Kroger in the morning hours, the big shade trees in the people’s yard make for a truly delightful shady rest area.

So, anyway, I made it there and back, first time I’ve done that since November 2019. After a rest, I took a glucose reading — 81! Bravo for me. Most of the time my glucose readings are within a good range, maybe once or twice a week I go over 130 before lunch or dinner, so I have to take a fast-acting insulin that starts to work in about 15 minutes and peaks around 2 hours later.

Thanks to money not my own, I have replaced the computer with a model I can live and work with. I think I mentioned previously that this laptop (a gift from a friend last spring) has been an asset since the other really big computer (also given to me by another friend last spring) died a month or so ago — complete hard drive failure. I’m still not sure if I want to take it to the shop and get a new hard drive and get it fully restored. It’s over 8 years old now, so I’m not sure the hardware would support the latest softwares, so I will sit on it a while and consider what can be done and how much it would cost. It really was a great computer, but when I checked pricing to buy a brand new one just like it (but the latest model) would have been 4 figures, and I didn’t have that much money available to me.

So anyway, the new computer arrived on Sunday, and I got it booted up and started. It came with Windows 10, and once I got it registered and so forth, it asked me if I wanted to download and install Windows 11. Yikes. I didn’t even know Windows 11 was out, but apparently it is. So I got that downloaded and ready to use. This afternoon I’m going to focus on getting it set up with my essential softwares — OpenOffice productivity suite, GIMP photo editing, and my video production software. Plus some assorted accessories that I like to have. I’m using the external hard drive for storage, plus the cloud for essential stuff I can’t afford to lose, so I don’t much care that the new computer only has about 528GB hard drive (which I noticed was already half used with Windows “stuff”. It has 8G of RAM, which is twice what the laptop has, so I should be able to do all that I need to do.

So, that’s my afternoon ahead. I may have to resort to YouTube videos about Windows 11 to understand how things work there.