Never Turn Your Back on a Hateful Old Woman at an Assisted Living Facility

I'm pretty much exhausted at the moment and I'm doing some serious thinking about taking a nap.  This is the eleventh day that I've been taking care of my father, a period that began with an emergency room phone call, moved on to a hospital stay for testing, the insertion of a pacemaker, and four days of him recuperating at my home.  Sleep has been a catch-as-catch-can novelty for me during all of this, and there were only two or three times that I got more than three consecutive hours in.  

But this is what I want to tell you about.

I took Dad back to his assisted living facility a couple of days ago and stayed with him in his apartment there for three days.  There is no public wi-fi in the building, but they have a nice little computer room set up on the second floor that is open to residents and those staying with them on a temporary basis.  While dad was in a rare deep sleep, I decided to sneak upstairs for a few minutes to use one of the computers.  I went up and down the stairs every 15 minutes checking on my dad's sleep, but still managed to get in 90 solid minutes of computer time during which I wrote a review of Matt Gallagher's Youngblood (a new novel set in Iraq just before American troops were officially pulled from that country).  

One problem: I forgot to bring my flash drive upstairs with me, and that meant another trip downstairs.  As I was leaving, I mentioned to the elderly woman who was coming into the room that I was using the computer on the end of the row, and I asked her to keep an eye on it for me until I got back upstairs.  It took me an extra few minutes to remember where the drive was, but still I was back in the computer room in less than ten minutes.  

The old woman was nowhere in sight when I returned - and neither was my review.  Apparently, she sat right down at my computer and deleted the word document...then she proceeded to empty the recycle bin, leaving no trace of the document anywhere on the computer hard drive.  Then she disappeared.

The lesson here?  Never, never turn your back on spiteful old lady who thinks she is too old to be held accountable for her meanness.  The smartest thing she did was run for her life before I got back...she did us both a favor by doing that.