Face of Chaos

When I got to my parents’ house yesterday afternoon, Mom was outside sweeping the (empty) driveway.  She was adamant that her encounter with the semi hadn’t affected her at all physically and I really can’t disagree.  Emotionally, she and Dad were are still coming to terms with events, but they’re doing better today.  They’ve seen and photographed the damages, spoken with body shops and insurance companies, and have a better sense of what’s likely to happen over the next few weeks.

As a family, we burned through a lot of karma on Saturday and, for the moment, it looks like we’re going to be able patch our lives back together without too many changes. 

My  new chair may turn out to be a bigger change.  It arrived today…in pieces, in large box with a single page of purely symbolic construction diagrams. The diagrams were actually pretty straight-forward, though I could have used a helper when it came time to attach the seat to the base and the back to the seat.  This beast is heavy!  Fifty-five pounds, according to the box, more than twice the weight of the Balans.  And more controls than my first Volkswagen.  I’ve figured out everything except the forward-tilt, which was one of the purchase criteria.  I found the proper lever, but pulling on it didn’t do anything.  I called customer service (I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing when your task chair comes with a 1-800 customer service number) and they promise to have a technical service rep call me tomorrow morning.  (And what do you do for a living?  I’m a long-distance chair tech….)

Sitting in it is a very different sensation.  Well, probably a fairly ordinary experience for anyone who’s sat in an actual chair for any length of time, but it’s been 28 years since I’ve tried that trick.  Honestly, in those 28 years, I never met anyone who liked my Balans.  A good many people took one look at it and asked for a real chair, or they tried to type while standing or even kneeling on the floor.  Everyone said it hurt their knees.

For me it had been love at first sight in an ad in a computer newsletter that made the rounds at AAA-Michigan where I was working in the early 80s.  The first thing I did when I quit AAA to start writing full time was order my Balans.  Bob and the kids were quite appalled when I assembled it in the living room.  At least I never had the Goldilocks problem: no one ever wanted to sit in my chair.

One did not “sit up straight” in a Balans; straight in a Balans is tilted about twenty degrees off perpendicular, which took most of the weight/pressure off my pelvis (bear in mind, my mom’s had four hip replacements….and I inherited her bone structure…keeping pressure off my pelvis has always been important to me.)  Based on the first six hours, I think I can be pain-free in the new chair…even if I can’t figure out how to make the forward-tilt lever do something useful, but it’s going to take practice…

..and maybe a visit to the eye doctor.  Getting a good center-of-balance in the new chair puts my eyes a good twelve inches farther from the monitor or right in the wrong spot, vision-wise, for my computer glasses.

This whole growing old thing is a royal pain.