A weekend with Grandma

I spent the weekend in St. Paul, MN with my 84 year old grandmother. She asked me for help to replace her old computer which she bought in 1999. We got her setup with a DSL connection, new monitor, plenty of ram. We opted for XP over Windows Vista.

As I find with most of my family visits I was grilled on a variety of computer questions. While I would give my grandmother 5 stars for her level of computer knowledge relative to her age group, she is still very much a newbie to the modern Internet. She emails with family and friends, monitors her investments, and will occasionally look up a website address she’s clipped out of the newspaper or a magazine (which I find very 50s-esque.) For some reason I feel compelled to try to explain how the DSL line works. I am forced to retreat to topics such as explaining that Internet Explorer is not Google & vice versa, but I have to admit the difference is somewhat ethereal. Explaining tab menus goes a bit better when I can pull out physical folders with real tabs and show her the tangible office supply juxtaposed to its virtual cousin on the screen.

How do I know how to right click? Why doesn’t her 1997 greeting card program work in Windows XP? (Microsoft Greetings v3.0.0.0 in case anyone can help with that.) How do you attach more than one picture to an email? (“When I right-click on the image it says, attach to email… but how do I get two images on the same email?)

We engage in a Paul Bunion vs. the steam saw style competition when looking up words for the crossword puzzle. I win a few times, but only on the modern movie questions that came out after her crossword dictionary was published. Her page turning skills still give Google a run for its money.

We talk to family in Seattle, Montana & Colorado on the new web-cam. We sponsor a two aspiring entrepreneurs on Kiva.org. We play more than a few rounds of spider-solitaire. We learn about the continental knitting technique on YouTube. I show her how to avoid the ads on Windows Media player in order to play her classical music CDs and how to play the Scott Joplin tracks she downloaded off Napster back in the music free-for-all of the dot com boom.